The Great War
Published on 30 Apr 2018Visit the Museum: http://hohenlockstedt-museum.de/
During World War 1 Finnish volunteers were trained in Northern Germany. The 27th Jäger Battalion is an important part of Finnish history and we explored their beginnings in Hohenlockstedt or Lockstedter Lager as it was called in 1915.
May 1, 2018
The Finnish Jägers In World War 1 I THE GREAT WAR On The Road
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Sikh separatists (and even terrorists) are being protected by the federal government
There’s no reason that Canadian Sikhs can’t agitate for their fellow Sikhs in India to create a separate country in the Punjab, but that freedom must not include active support for terrorists. The Canadian government is looking particularly bad on this front, and it isn’t just because of Justin Trudeau’s farcical adventures on his recent trip to India. None of the major federal parties want to appear to be anti-Sikh, as Sikh voters cluster in several key swing ridings around the country, and any criticism of the terrorists is spun as an attack on all Sikhs. At Quillette Terry Milewski details the government’s unwillingness to deal with the problem:
The Sikh faith, created in what is now northern India by the 15th-century Guru Nanak, remains obscure to many in the West. Turbaned Sikh men are sometimes confused with Muslims, and some have been assaulted by confused thugs following Islamist terrorist attacks. Like the United States, Britain and other Western countries, Canada has been home to emigrant Sikhs for generations—the vast majority of them living peaceably in their adopted homeland.
In the 1980s, however, a powerful spasm of separatist militancy shook India and spread to the Sikh diaspora. In June, 1984, two months before the Madison Square Garden convention, Prime Minister Gandhi and her government set out to end a killing spree by Sikh militants who had turned the Sikhs’ holiest site — the Golden Temple at Amritsar — into an armed camp. The Indian army wrecked the temple complex and took many lives. Revenge came on October 31, 1984, when Gandhi was gunned down in her garden by two of her Sikh bodyguards. Hindu mobs immediately took revenge for the revenge, slaughtering thousands of Sikhs in hellish reprisals that were aggravated by official complicity. The police looked the other way. The horrors of 1984 won’t be forgotten by either side.
Soon, Canada and its Sikh community were dragged into the thick of the struggle. In June of 1985, Parmar’s Babbar Khalsa placed suitcase bombs on two planes leaving Vancouver. One brought down Flight 182, a massacre that remained, until 9/11, the deadliest terrorist attack in the history of aviation. The second bomb, intended to destroy another Air India plane simultaneously, exploded on the ground at Narita Airport in Japan, killing two baggage handlers. The reverberations from the attack were so profound in Canada that even today, 33 years later, a striking emblem of the Khalistani dream survives: a large “martyr” poster honouring Talwinder Parmar, sword in hand, permanently fixed to the exterior of an important Sikh gurdwara in Surrey, British Columbia. Tens of thousands gather beneath it each spring for an annual Sikh parade. In American terms, the poster is equivalent to a public veneration of Osama Bin Laden.
[…]
Today, the parents who lost their children [on Air India Flight 182] are old, the orphaned children have their own children and the Sikh struggle for independence is moribund in India. Last year, in fact, Sikh voters overwhelmingly supported a united India and were key to the election of the Congress Party — the party of Indira Gandhi — to govern the Sikh homeland of Punjab. Support for Congress was especially strong in majority-Sikh districts. And Punjab’s Chief Minister is a strongly pro-unity Sikh, Amarinder Singh, who has alleged separatist influence in the Canadian government.
Harjit Sajjan, a Sikh who is Canada’s Minister of National Defence, firmly denied the claim. And on Justin Trudeau’s visit to India this year, Singh agreed to a photo-op including Sajjan. But the Chief Minister let it be known that he’d handed over a list of Canadians he suspects of fundraising for Punjab’s few remaining separatist Sikh militants.
The listed suspects amount to a tiny subculture among Canada’s 450,000 Sikhs, the vast bulk of whom seek no return to the bloody 1980s and 1990s, when the battle for Khalistan took some 20,000 lives in India, most of them Sikh. But the hardliners are a well-organized political force, still raising the cry of “Khalistan Zindabad!” — long live Khalistan — in some Canadian gurdwaras where “martyred” Sikh assassins are memorialized as models for the young. These include the two bodyguards who machine-gunned Indira Gandhi. Khalistani fervour is alive on social media and a 2018 tweet from “George” (@PCPO_Brampton) declared: “Indira’s assassins are HEROES. Sikhs should glorify them.”
The endurance of such attitudes in Canada reflects the weak record of its justice system in deterring violence. For years, it seemed, Canadian courts were where terrorism cases went to die.
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Shooting a Suppressed Sten Gun
Forgotten Weapons
Published on 19 Mar 2018Sold for $7,475 (transferrable).
During World War Two, the British spent several years developing a silenced version of the Sten gun for special operations commandos and for dropping to mainland European resistance units. This is a recreation of one of the experimental types, based on a MkII Sten with the receiver lengthened into an integral suppressor. So – how does it shoot?
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QotD: The work of Epicurus
According to Diogenes Laertius, Epicurus himself was the most prolific of all the main ancient philosophers. His total original writings filled 300 papyrus rolls. If we take one papyrus roll as containing the equivalent of 30 printed octavo pages, his collected works would fill 30 modern volumes. His longest single work, On Nature, filled 37 papyrus rolls, which makes it about as long as Das Kapital.
To these original writings, we must add the various writings of his followers, both during his life and during the following six centuries or so. These also were substantial. Taken together, they must easily have filled a library.
Moreover, unlike its main rivals, Epicureanism was a proselytising philosophy. There were no hidden teachings — no mysteries too complex for the written word. There was no need for long preparatory studies in logic and mathematics and rhetoric before the meaning of the Master could become plain. No one was too old or too young to embrace the truths taught by Epicurus. He accepted slaves and even women to the courses he ran in the Garden. He wrote in the plainest Greek consistent with precise expression of his doctrines. He discouraged his followers from poetry and rhetoric.
For those able or inclined to study his doctrines in full, there were the many volumes of On Nature. For those not so able or inclined, there was a still substantial abridgement, and then a shorter summary. For the less attentive or the uneducated, there were collections of very brief sayings — whole arguments compressed into statements that could be memorised and repeated.
Nearly all of these works have vanished. Of what Epicurus himself wrote, we have three complete letters and a list of brief sayings known as the Principal Doctrines. Of other Epicurean writings, we have the Vatican Sayings, which is another collection of brief statements, some by Epicurus. We have a biography of Epicurus by Diogenes Laertius, which summarises his main doctrines and also contains the only extant whole works already mentioned. We have more of the brief statements and a partial summary of the whole system inscribed at the expense of another Diogenes on a wall in Oenanda, a city in what is now northern Turkey.
Sean Gabb, “Epicurus: Father of the Enlightenment”, speaking to the 6/20 Club in London, 2007-09-06.
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