Obama and Europe - two of the silliest things ever

[Greyblades]

Hrm, I was hoping for wikipedia articals. Never mind I looked em up myself particually the Kikuyu one, and I found that both sides comitted many atrocities to each other and the people caught between.

Contrary to African customs and values, Mau Mau members assaulted old people, women and children. The horrors they practiced included the following: decapitation and general mutilation of civilians, torture before murder, bodies bound up in sacks and dropped in wells, burning the victims alive, gouging out of eyes, splitting open the stomachs of pregnant women. No war can justify such gruesome actions. In man's inhumanity to man there is no race distinction. The Africans were practising it on themselves. There was no reason and no restraint on both sides.

—Bethwell Ogot

The most notorious was their attack on the settlement of Lari, on the night of 25–26 March 1953, in which they herded Kikuyu men, women and children into huts and set fire to them, hacking down with pangas anyone who attempted escape, before throwing them back in to the burning huts. The attack at Lari was so extreme that "African policemen who saw the bodies of the victims . . . were physically sick and said 'These people are animals. If I see one now I shall shoot with the greatest eagerness'", and it "even shocked many Mau Mau supporters, some of whom would subsequently try to excuse the attack as 'a mistake'"

A British officer describes his actions after capturing three Mau Mau suspects:

I stuck my revolver right in his grinning mouth and I said something, I don't remember what, and I pulled the trigger. His brains went all over the side of the police station. The other two Mickeys [Mau Mau] were standing there looking blank. I said to them that if they didn't tell me where to find the rest of the gang I'd kill them too. They didn't say a word so I shot them both. One wasn't dead so I shot him in the ear. When the sub-inspector drove up, I told him that the Mickeys tried to escape. He didn't believe me but all he said was 'bury them and see the wall is cleared up.

And from british screenings:

Electric shock was widely used, as well as cigarettes and fire. Bottles (often broken), gun barrels, knives, snakes, vermin, and hot eggs were thrust up men's rectums and women's vaginas. The screening teams whipped, shot, burned and mutilated Mau Mau suspects, ostensibly to gather intelligence for military operations and as court evidence.

—Caroline Elkins

In David Anderson's words, "a story of atrocity and excess on both sides, a dirty war from which no one emerged with much pride, and certainly no glory."

Not exactly a pleasant read.

You should look carefully into the collapse of the Empire in the 50's and 60's, ugly, ugly, ugly. We did, after all, deliberately commit multiple acts of cultural genocide, toppled democratic governments (including Iran's) and did various other pretty shocking things.

While I don't know Mike Davies I do know that, for example, India was exporting rice during famines in the 19th Century.

As to the Boers, well you may want to ask my Boer Aunt about that - or perhaps not. I read a book which indicated that reports at the time concluded that certain camp commanders were deliberately running down food and medicine in order to make the problem (the women and children) "go away", it wasn't a modern left-leaning one, either.

Then there are all the Germans and Italians we shot in cold blood, and more recently the phospherus grenades we used to burn Argentinain conscripts alive in their trenches.

And yet my admiration for empire is not deminished, I see it as a country reacting badly to situations they didnt want, and that's the thing, we didnt want to massacre the mau mau, the boers or the indians but were forced into the situations, where such things were considered neccisary, by the disgruntled natives, the incompetence of the people we put in charge and our own mistakes.
And that's what really gets me when people compare the nazis to colonializm, we didnt set out to kill, yet the nazis were planning to get rid of the jews from the start, and they committed such horrors, not out of poorly percieved necessity, but of unprovoked malace and racist hatred.

[a completely inoffensive name]

America never wanted to enslave blacks, but the cotton was right there! And the Georgia sun makes labor so tiring....

[Greyblades]

America never wanted to enslave blacks, but the cotton was right there! And the Georgia sun makes labor so tiring....

Heh, nice, though I dont excuse them or anyone of slavery.

[Philippus Flavius Homovallumus]

And that's what really gets me when people compare the nazis to colonializm, we didnt set out to kill, yet the nazis were planning to get rid of the jews from the start, and they committed such horrors, not out of poorly percieved necessity, but of unprovoked malace and racist hatred.

The Nazi's didn't "set out" to kill Jews either, just to remove them from Europe - that's the point.

[Sasaki Kojiro]

I have read the books. There is certainly an anti-colonialist, and indeed anti-British sentiment in the latter two. (Davis has his own leanings that go beyond colonialism.) Of course, most works on the British Empire are written from a British or at least Western perspective. With histories, you have to learn to glean the research-supported facts from the editorial bias. There are plenty of those facts in each book that paint a British Empire with the same racist views towards subhumans that the Nazis held, views that lead to the same kind of state sponsored mass deaths that occurred under the Nazis. India alone was essentially to Britain what Hitler wanted Russia to be to Germany - starved and dehumanized into a slave state good for nothing but resource harvesting. Indian and other scholars are just coming to terms with British excesses in that region.

The kenya one is the one I googled:

More generally, there are grave doubts over Goldhagen’s principal source for his account of Kenyan “genocide”: namely, Caroline Elkins’s book Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story of Britain's Gulag in Kenya ↑ (Henry Holt, 2005).

Britain’s Gulag: The Brutal End of Empire in Kenya ↑ (as the book was called in the United Kingdom) may have been written by a Harvard University professor and won a Pulitzer prize; but it was widely criticised even by sympathetic reviewers for its shrill comparisons between British policy in Kenya and the Nazi holocaust (see, for example, Neal Ascherson, “The Breaking of the Mau Mau ↑ ” [New York Review of Books, 7 April 2005]). Some academic reviewers were more dismissive. Susan Carruthers ↑ of Rutgers University, who noted that Elkins had managed to confuse the Hutu and the Tutsi in Rwanda, said: “she proves the least reliable guide to history: this was not genocide - history is not well served by its sloppy invocation”.

Elkins’s cavalier approach to evidence is highlighted by the complete unreliability of her most notorious assertion: that there were some 300,000 “unaccounted for” Kikuyu at the end of the British campaign against the Mau Mau rebellion, as compared with the official figure of 11,503 Mau Mau killed in action. I was one of those who drew attention to these flaws of approach and detail (see “Tell me where I’m wrong ↑ ” [London Review of Books, 2 June 2005]) and “The End of the Mau Mau” ↑ [New York Review of Books, 23 June 2005].

In these letters I demonstrate how Elkins manipulates her comparisons of Kenyan ethnic populations in the censuses of 1948 and 1962, covering the Mau Mau years. She chooses six ethnic groups. Comparing the Kikuyu to the other five would have shown a 60% increase for the Kikuyu from one census to the other, and a 51% increase for the other five. Elkins, however, chooses to treat the two groups with lowest growth - the Embu and Meru - as “Kikuyu” (on the grounds that they spoke the Kikuyu language ↑ ), thus creating a contrast between a 42% growth for the combined “Kikuyu” and 61% for the remaining three groups (Kamba, Luo and Luhya). By this sleight of hand she creates a theoretical shortfall of 19%, which she then translated into her “300,000 unaccounted for”; a figure that Goldhagen uncritically recycles.

http://www.opendemocracy.net/david-e...ycling-fantasy


Basically my theory (which makes me sad) is that a great many people move past the high school version of history (which is perfectly fine--because it's for kids) and then go for an equally silly version of history which they don't treat skeptically because "the high school version is so obviously false". I'm thinking of pvc's "the nazi's were pretty horrific, but the allies were no saints" talk, no offense pvc.

There's enough good history books out there. Having a western perspective is a good thing. It's not like self-criticism isn't a feature of western thinking.

@pj:If you take our past as generally good and steadily improving, you naturally reject any radical political views. Thus people with radical political views are strongly motivated to attack the past. They usually attack the present too, and present a glorious future to give something for people to be passionate about. This is why no history written by radicals is worth reading. There's plenty written by regular conservatives and liberals.

[Askthepizzaguy]

I take it that the OP has abdicated, and without the local monarch, the peasants have revolted and started a new topic entirely?

If so, I claim credit for starting the revolution. We shall build a great nation, and I will be the father of your country. Put me in your history books, SilliestThingsEver-land.

[gaelic cowboy]

When people claim benign neglect as the primary reason for the Indian Famine they must realise how hollow it sounds to me as an Irish person, they knew full well the consequences of food export during droughts.

It is without doubt one of the largest stains on the empire that both India and Ireland suffered famines when there was absolutely no need for it.
There was no millitary, economic or even a proper agricultural reason for the famine to occur, both places had plenty of other foods available that the people could eat.

In the case of Indian it's pretty damming because those had done it before here in 1840s and so were well aware of the potential for devestation among the populace.

They chose to ignore the lessons they had learned in Ireland and as a result India suffered even worse, I wonder if the crops had failed in Kent would they have stayed so mechanical.

[Papewaio]

One of the many reasons not to let market forces be unleashed.

I'm pretty happy that the GFC is mainly a curb on luxuries not basic food stuffs.

[InsaneApache]

Just some thoughts on the Allies v the Axis.

WWII didn't start off as a 'just war', it was a local European war that morphed into a 'just war' after the event. Rather like the ACW.

As for the Allies being compared to the Third Reich? Absolute piffle. That's like comparing Pol Pot with Nelson Mandela.

Anecdotally; Recently I was talking with my father, who's brother was one of the first British troops to liberate Belsen. He, my uncle, never talked about it. One thing my father did say was that when footage of the camp was shown in the cinemas, people cried and wailed at what they saw. People were physically sick and many ran from the auditorium.

Say what you like about the British but if it wasn't for us then Germany may well have prevailed. Yes we lost the Empire, yes we were buggered financially, yes we got things wrong. We're not perfect. However the world owed us an moral obligation for continuing the fight alone for nearly a year.

The alternative is too horrible to contemplate.

[Vladimir]

And since we're wildly off topic already: What a gamble! If things would have turned out differently in the U.S. and Germany not declared war on the U.S. you guys would have been hosed. Britain's suffering was her greatest contribution to the war.

[gaelic cowboy]

And since we're wildly off topic already: What a gamble! If things would have turned out differently in the U.S. and Germany not declared war on the U.S. you guys would have been hosed. Britain's suffering was her greatest contribution to the war.

America couldnt sit around and let the entire industrial might of Europe and the materials from the various empires fall into the hands of Germany.

The collision was quite frankly inevitable, the USA would have ended up in some kind of a fight regardless.

[Philippus Flavius Homovallumus]

Basically my theory (which makes me sad) is that a great many people move past the high school version of history (which is perfectly fine--because it's for kids) and then go for an equally silly version of history which they don't treat skeptically because "the high school version is so obviously false". I'm thinking of pvc's "the nazi's were pretty horrific, but the allies were no saints" talk, no offense pvc.

There's enough good history books out there. Having a western perspective is a good thing. It's not like self-criticism isn't a feature of western thinking.

@pj:If you takeour past as generally good and steadily improving , you naturally reject any radical political views. Thus people with radical political views are strongly motivated to attack the past. They usually attack the present too, and present a glorious future to give something for people to be passionate about. This is why no history written by radicals is worth reading. There's plenty written by regular conservatives and liberals.

The Allies were no saints though, and unlike someone with a High School history education I know what I'm talking about. In any direct comparison the Allies come out on top in terms of conduct but the point to grasp is that the NAZI's were at the extreme end of a continium, not in a different direction completely. Hitler was part of a pan-European hatred of Jews, in his case the solution was extermination but many English Anti-Semnites supported Zionism as a way to "get rid of" Jewish people.

none of this changes the fact that while the Germans were keeping Jews in concentration camps the Americans were doing the same for ethnic Japanese.

As to not reading "radical" history, most serious historians are "semi-radical" by virtue of being academics. More pointedly, most history books are rubbish, unless it's something minute like, "The history of British infantry doctrine from 1890 to 1945". As for the idea that, "our past [is] generally good and steadily improving" is frankly laughable, progress over the last two hundred years, certainly, but further back than that the question is extremely murky. Although, I can think of at least one recent example of progress followed by regress: After the American Civil War Blacks effectively gained full political rights, which were then gradually chipped away by Congress and the Supreme Court - which is the context within which MLK gave his famous speech.

Just some thoughts on the Allies v the Axis.

WWII didn't start off as a 'just war', it was a local European war that morphed into a 'just war' after the event. Rather like the ACW.

As for the Allies being compared to the Third Reich? Absolute piffle. That's like comparing Pol Pot with Nelson Mandela.

Anecdotally; Recently I was talking with my father, who's brother was one of the first British troops to liberate Belsen. He, my uncle, never talked about it. One thing my father did say was that when footage of the camp was shown in the cinemas, people cried and wailed at what they saw. People were physically sick and many ran from the auditorium.

Say what you like about the British but if it wasn't for us then Germany may well have prevailed. Yes we lost the Empire, yes we were buggered financially, yes we got things wrong. We're not perfect. However the world owed us an moral obligation for continuing the fight alone for nearly a year.

The alternative is too horrible to contemplate.

And therin lies the crucial difference, the systematic and deliberate extermination of an entire people. Unique in modern times.

[rvg]

And therin lies the crucial difference, the systematic and deliberate extermination of an entire people. Unique in modern times.

I wouldn't call it unique. Genocide has been with us since the biblical times.

[Vladimir]

America couldnt sit around and let the entire industrial might of Europe and the materials from the various empires fall into the hands of Germany.

The collision was quite frankly inevitable, the USA would have ended up in some kind of a fight regardless.

Yes we could have. And still, inevitable doesn't have a time frame. Quite the gamble.

I wouldn't call it unique. Genocide has been with us since the biblical times.

Agreed. It's quite common if less effective in many periods of human history.

[Sasaki Kojiro]

The Allies were no saints though, and unlike someone with a High School history education I know what I'm talking about.

But that's exactly my point

The high school version of history may be that the allies were "saints" but in reality most people reject that conception while still in high school. And too often they replace it with lazy equivalencies.

[gaelic cowboy]

Yes we could have. And still, inevitable doesn't have a time frame. Quite the gamble.

The gamble was in allowing fascist regimes to encroach on both pacific and atlantic coasts and think you wouldnt suffer, naturally since atlantic trade was prob worth more at the time Hitler needed to be done in first Japan could wait.

[Rhyfelwyr]

@pj:If you take our past as generally good and steadily improving, you naturally reject any radical political views. Thus people with radical political views are strongly motivated to attack the past. They usually attack the present too, and present a glorious future to give something for people to be passionate about. This is why no history written by radicals is worth reading. There's plenty written by regular conservatives and liberals.

Disagree completey. First off, you can only judge historians as being 'radical' in relation to what your own (or perhaps mainstream) beliefs are. Which of course doesn't in any way address the content of what they are actually saying, and shows a complete lack of self-reflection in considering why your own views lie where they do on the spectrum.

Secondly, the whole narrative of views being placed on a single spectrum (usually left-right), with those at the far ends being deemed 'radical' is itself a construction of the mid-nineteenth century and the situation that existed then. It takes the work of historians, philosophers, sociologists etc and rams them into a framework that they would most likely never have subscribed to.

A good example of this would be elements of Marx's work. For example, his views on property are viewed as radically left-wing, when in fact his opposition to "bourgeoisie property" was really just an extension of Adam Smith's natural law idea of property being acquired through the fruit of an individual's own labour. Likewise Marx's deterministic view of history with the (IIRC) four stages predating capitalism happen to be the exact same as those propsed by Adam Smith (look up stadial theory).

Marx uses the exact same philosophical justifications and makes the same socioeconomic observations as Smith, yet because his ideas were viewed from a different point in history, they are dismissed today as being radical.

That is blindness on our part.

And furthermore, if people feel that their identification as 'conservatives' or 'liberals' is relevant with regards to their understanding of history, then it is their history books that are not worth reading.

[Sasaki Kojiro]

Disagree completey. First off, you can only judge historians as being 'radical' in relation to what your own (or perhaps mainstream) beliefs are. Which of course doesn't in any way address the content of what they are actually saying, and shows a complete lack of self-reflection in considering why your own views lie where they do on the spectrum.

And furthermore, if people feel that their identification as 'conservatives' or 'liberals' is relevant with regards to their understanding of history, then it is their history books that are not worth reading.

???

e.g., Howard zinn is radical, and his book is filled with trash as he relentlessly attempts fit everything into his belief system. You can object to dismissing marx (which people don't really do) but surely you agree that rewriting history to conform to marxist theory is bad. Other historians don't do that and give a good perspective, telling the story in such away that a person who disagrees with them still finds the book useful and can see where they disagree. They aren't writing conservative or liberal history they are just a conservative or liberal person writing history.

[Rhyfelwyr]

e.g., Howard zinn is radical, and his book is filled with trash as he relentlessly attempts fit everything into his belief system. You can object to dismissing marx (which people don't really do) but surely you agree that rewriting history to conform to marxist theory is bad.

It looks like you are conflating people that hold "radical" views with people that attempt to mould history to their ideologies. The are two separate matters, and the latter is simply poor work or dishonesty on the part of that historian. What you might dub an extremist is no more prone to it than a moderate conservative.

And as for "rewriting history to conform to marxist theory", again that is something different from using certain tenents of marxist historiography as a framework for placing isolated periods of history within a wider context. And because many historians do the latter, the marxist strain of thought on history continues to be mainstream and respected even when Marxism the ideology has become defunct.

Other historians don't do that and give a good perspective, telling the story in such away that a person who disagrees with them still finds the book useful and can see where they disagree. They aren't writing conservative or liberal history they are just a conservative or liberal person writing history.

The thing is there is no reason for their conservatism or liberalism to be relevant when they write their history. Those two terms are vague and presuming you are going by the modern American usages, they are very modern creations. Unlike Marxism, they don't offer a new perspective through which to view history.

The nature of Marxist thought was that it offered an explanation of what forces shaped history to take the path that it did. Conservatism or liberalism don't do that.

Of course if they are as you say just a "conservative or liberal person writing history", then that's fine. But why do you feel the need to point out that they were, as you said earlier, "just a regular conservative or liberal"? Would anyone else be less capable of separating their political views from their historical studies?

[Sasaki Kojiro]

It looks like you are conflating people that hold "radical" views with people that attempt to mould history to their ideologies. The are two separate matters, and the latter is simply poor work or dishonesty on the part of that historian. What you might dub an extremist is no more prone to it than a moderate conservative.

mmm, this is just back to square one. The more radical a historians political beliefs, the more motivated they are to distort history. Obviously if I'm wrong about dubbing someone an extremist, that's different, but if I'm not then they are certainly more prone to do it than a moderate conservative, who is reasonably likely to try and tell what happened, because he believes that what actually happened supports him in his belief.

I'm not sure what you are thinking of when you hear radical. It's not like "having ideas outside the mainstream". Someone who is a passionate atheist is motivated to write a book mentioning only the worst of the church. That's not a strange idea at all.


Regular conservatives are motivated to overly praise, say, the founders and that time period, and to denigrate the recent past with it's changes. Regular progressives are motivated to focus on the bad things and tell history as a series of victories for the progressives, with the end conclusion being that of course we should support the progressives today. But if they are not very radical they also realize the importance of the truth, and have standards for the truth. This makes their history worth reading.

As you get more radical, the concern for truth diminishes. People who desire massive change have to shake peoples faith and calm trust in general improvement, and thus end up portraying history as an unending series of minor victories against oppression, with most of the battle still to be fought, and things like that.

(Obviously, in societies that are in serious need of radical change the radical historian may be the only trustworthy historian.)

I kind of missed the obvious in my description.

Although sometimes radical historians argue for their own story of history, often they just attack whatever they perceive as the view their political opponents hold. The goal is to discredit the opponents without much regard to actual history.

[Rhyfelwyr]

Well I think you are making a lot of assumptions about the character of 'radical' historians and how they conduct themselves.

Besides guys that are obviously crackpots, what examples are you basing this on? What sort of historians are doing it? Communist, fascist, anarchist, religious extremist, libertarian etc?

It's just that those guys often have a lot of charges made against them, that I've rarely found to actually be true. I think this stems largely from the laziness of those with more mainstream beliefs to actually look at what they are saying seriously.

[Philippus Flavius Homovallumus]

Regular conservatives are motivated to overly praise, say, the founders and that time period, and to denigrate the recent past with it's changes. Regular progressives are motivated to focus on the bad things and tell history as a series of victories for the progressives, with the end conclusion being that of course we should support the progressives today. But if they are not very radical they also realize the importance of the truth, and have standards for the truth. This makes their history worth reading.

If these are the two options in America with regards to your historical narrative it explains the generally poor understanding Americans seem to have of their history.

What you seem to be talking about is a political extremist (left or right) writing their version of history. What I, and I expect Rhy, are discussing is a radical historian. Such a person is someone who goes against the establish narrative within the Academe, not someone who will ALWAYS vote Republican or Democrat.

THIS is a radical historian: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francesca_Stavrakopoulou someone I personally dissagree with on methodological grounds, but very nice and very popular among her students.

[Sasaki Kojiro]

I've had the opposite experience. Many really bad historians are defended by "everyone has their bias, you just have to keep that in mind while you read the book". And then I look at the book itself and it's a clumsy attempt solely aimed at promoting some dumb belief of the author. Worthless.

What you seem to be talking about is a political extremist (left or right) writing their version of history. What I, and I expect Rhy, are discussing is a radical historian. Such a person is someone who goes against the establish narrative within the Academe, not someone who will ALWAYS vote Republican or Democrat.

Yes, politically radical, hence the repetition of "radical political" in my original comment...not the equivalent of say, someone in science suggesting a radical theory of somesuch.

If these are the two options in America with regards to your historical narrative

Umm, most people could loosely be described as conservative or progressive, sure. But notice I'm talking specifically about people who believe the truth supports them and are quite conscientious about it. That makes neither of them a bad option.

[Greyblades]

The Nazi's didn't "set out" to kill Jews either, just to remove them from Europe - that's the point.

Hrm poor choice of words on my part, I meant that the nazi's set out to harm the jews by kicking them out and later killing them, British colonists for the most part set out to make money and the atrocities against the natives were the aftermath of said attempts.

When people claim benign neglect as the primary reason for the Indian Famine they must realise how hollow it sounds to me as an Irish person, they knew full well the consequences of food export during droughts.

It is without doubt one of the largest stains on the empire that both India and Ireland suffered famines when there was absolutely no need for it.
There was no millitary, economic or even a proper agricultural reason for the famine to occur, both places had plenty of other foods available that the people could eat.

Huh, the way you say it, it sounds like both native irish and indians rebelled because they were too dumb to find those other foods. :P

In the case of Indian it's pretty damming because those had done it before here in 1840s and so were well aware of the potential for devestation among the populace.

They chose to ignore the lessons they had learned in Ireland and as a result India suffered even worse, I wonder if the crops had failed in Kent would they have stayed so mechanical.

Meh, they made mistakes in a persuit of profit, thats pretty much the same with every country, heck the only reason it took two famines for us to learn was because the first one didnt do enough damage to make the ruling class consider changing methods would be worth it.

[rvg]

It's just that those guys often have a lot of charges made against them, that I've rarely found to actually be true. I think this stems largely from the laziness of those with more mainstream beliefs to actually look at what they are saying seriously.

Why take anything they say seriously? Historical facts do not change, all these guys offer is their interpretation of the facts which is largely a matter of opinion. One can argue that Hitler was a good man, that doesn't mean that I have to listen to that person or take their position seriously.

[Philippus Flavius Homovallumus]

Huh, the way you say it, it sounds like both native irish and indians rebelled because they were too dumb to find those other foods. :P

I'm going to jump on this to save Gaelic's blood pressure and to prevent you being verbally eviserated by Banquo.

The thing is, the Anglos, i.e. English colonists, controlled the production and sale of foodstuffs. So what happened is that English aristocrat continued to export food crops for profit instead of releasing them to the internal market and this is basically what caused the famine. It would have been dire straits in any case but the result of this policy was catastrophic, to the extent that Ireland's population in the latter half of the 19th century was less than during the Dark Ages.

[Greyblades]

It wasnt all that funny but I was kinda joking. Note the ":P"

[Philippus Flavius Homovallumus]

It wasnt all that funny but I was kinda joking. Note the ":P"

Generally speaking, people don't take well to having jokes made about events which severly truncated their family tree. Potato Famine jokes are like dead baby and Holocaust jokes, best not.

[Greyblades]

I know that, I wasnt making the joke to say that they were stupid, I was pointing out that gaelic's post gave the impression He was saying that. I found the absurdity kinda humorous, coming from the irish guy. I am neither stupid or bigoted enough to actually think that a joke saying the starving people were too dumb to live is funny.

[Philippus Flavius Homovallumus]

I know that, I wasnt making the joke to say that they were stupid, I was pointing out that gaelic's post gave the impression He was saying that. I found the absurdity kinda humorous, coming from the irish guy. I am neither stupid or bigoted enough to actually think that a joke saying the starving people were too dumb to live is funny.

So instead of making a joke in poor taste you made a joke about a joke in poor taste?

Keep digging...