Total special military operation?

Week or two back, I wrote a piece about the strange echoes of a previous war in this one. Scroll down if you’re interested; it’s here somewhere.

This morning, reading about the fighting inside the steelworks at Mariupol, I’m not thinking about the fighting inside the grain elevator at Stalingrad. I’m remembering that after the defeat at Stalingrad, Goebbels gave a speech in which he declared ‘Total War’.

On 18th February 1943, at the Berlin Sportpalast, to a carefully selected audience, Goebbels promised “a war more total and radical than anything that we can imagine today”. [Thanks to various sources on Google for that translation.]

Historical echoes are hard to block out, aren’t they?

Shopping list. Tinned food, bottled water, medical kit, loo rolls…