something queer going on

I tried to fight the urge to post about this, but sometimes someone is too wrong on the internet to ignore.

Siegfried Sassoon was an oficer, not an "ordinary enlisted soldier." His drawing "The Soul of an Officer" is a mildly satirical take on himself and his fellow officers, not an expression of "disdain." (When he did show disdain for those running the war--in which category he did not include junior officers on active service--he was a lot blunter about it.)

The fact that this example of stupid assumptions and failure-to-Google appears in a blog from NPR--National Public Radio, one of the most important and prestigious news sources in the United States--depresses me beyond words.


(In case the NPR blogpost gets edited, the bit I'm talking about reads "In a sketch in one notebook titled 'The Soul of An Officer,' Sassoon — an ordinary enlisted soldier — showed his disdain for those who were, quite literally, calling the shots. Under a picture of a figure in officer's cap, he scrawled 'death' and 'fear,' and below 'eating and drinking,' and 'commonplace chatter about war.'" The actual sketch can be seen at the BBC's more intelligent report about Sassoon's war diaries.)

Tumblr: Good source for interesting historical photos, terrible source for correct information about them. This is not Kaiser Wilhelm II, any more than these dashing young women are actually Rosa Luxemburg, Simone de Beauvoir, and Emma Goldman. (The mod of the latter Tumblr says that they assumed the image title was just a joke; maybe it is, but most of the people gleefully reposting the image don't seem to have caught on.)