Quotulatiousness

July 16, 2019

Totalitarian Temptations in Free Societies by Ryszard Legutko

Filed under: Books, Economics, Government, History, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Daniel Pipes reviews a recent translation (from Polish) by Teresa Adelson:

Legutko does not claim liberalism resembles communism in its monstrosity, much less that the two ideologies are identical; he fully acknowledges that the first is democratic and the second brutally tyrannical. After recognizing this contrast, however, he gets down to the more pungent topic of what the two have in common.

He first perceived those commonalities in the 1970s when visiting the West, where he saw how its liberals preferred communists to anti-communists; later, with the overthrow of the Soviet Bloc, he watched liberals warmly welcome communists, but not their anti-communist opponents. Why so?

Because, he argues, liberalism shares with communism a powerful faith in rational minds finding solutions which translates into a drive to improve the citizen, modernize him, and mold him into a superior being. Accordingly, both ideologies politicize, and thereby debase, every aspect of life, including sexuality, the family, religion, sports, entertainment, and the arts. (Here’s a mischievous but deadly serious question: which is the more awful art, the communist or the liberal, Stalin’s or the Venice Biennale’s?) [see below]

Both engage in social engineering to create a society whose members are “indistinguishable, in words, thoughts, and deeds ” from one another, aiming for a largely interchangeable population with no dissidents making trouble. Each sublimely assumes its specific vision constitutes the greatest hope for mankind and represents the end of history, the final stage of mankind’s evolution.

Trouble is, such grand schemes for improving mankind inevitably lead to severe disappointment; human beings, it turns out, are far more stubborn and less malleable then dreamers would like. When things go badly (say, food production for communists, unfettered immigration for liberals), two nasty consequences follow.

The Whowie – Monster of the Riverina – Yorta Yorta Myths (Australian Aboriginal) – Extra Mythology

Filed under: Australia, History — Tags: — Nicholas @ 04:00

Extra Credits
Published on 15 Jul 2019

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Once, the Tongala River, which most maps now call the Murray, was a place of peace where the Water-Rat Tribe could live with ease. But then one day appeared the Whowie: a great frog-headed lizard, long and fat and slow, prowling the banks.

Bitcoin mining’s massive carbon buttprint

Filed under: China, Economics, Environment, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Lincoln Swann explains why Bitcoin has become a huge environmental liability as its per-unit cost-to-mine has risen:

Bitcoin is more than a rather volatile imitation currency, it is also a huge energy monster.

The digital “mining” to create more Bitcoins and the recording of transactions uses up vast, crazy, amounts of electricity – something like 70TWh a year. That is about the same as Austria, say 20% of UK power consumption. As an added horror much if it is done in China where most of the power is coal generated.

All that adds up to a CO2 output from Bitcoin stuff of about 35mt a year. Planet friendly it definitely aint.

Knight’s Assault Machine Guns at the Range

Filed under: Military, Technology, Weapons — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Forgotten Weapons
Published on 11 May 2019

Preorders now open for my book, “Chassepot to FAMAS: French Military Rifles 1866-2016”! Get your copy here:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/…

Knights Armament introduced their “Assault Machine Gun” a couple years ago, and I had a chance to take both versions (5.56mm and 7.62mm) out to the range recently. The gun is the spiritual descendant of the Stoner 63, but is more directly made on Eugene Stoner’s Model 86 light machine gun. It utilizes the constant recoil principle, with the bolt never actually contacting the rear of the receiver during the cycling process. This results in recoil being felt by the shooter as a continuous steady force instead of a rapid series of impacts and that makes it tremendously controllable. Not surprisingly, these guns are already being sold to military and security organizations worldwide…

http://www.patreon.com/ForgottenWeapons

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QotD: Wartime atrocities

Filed under: Europe, Germany, History, Japan, Military, Quotations, WW2 — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Orwell’s press card portrait, 1943

I have little direct evidence about the atrocities in the Spanish civil war. I know that some were committed by the Republicans, and far more (they are still continuing) by the Fascists. But what impressed me then, and has impressed me ever since, is that atrocities are believed in or disbelieved in solely on grounds of political predilection. Everyone believes in the atrocities of the enemy and disbelieves in those of his own side, without ever bothering to examine the evidence. Recently I drew up a table of atrocities during the period between 1918 and the present; there was never a year when atrocities were not occurring somewhere or other, and there was hardly a single case when the Left and the Right believed in the same stories simultaneously. And stranger yet, at any moment the situation can suddenly reverse itself and yesterday’s proved-to-the-hilt atrocity story can become a ridiculous lie, merely because the political landscape has changed.

In the present war we are in the curious situation that our “atrocity campaign” was done largely before the war started, and done mostly by the Left, the people who normally pride themselves on their incredulity. In the same period the Right, the atrocity-mongers of 1914-18, were gazing at Nazi Germany and flatly refusing to see any evil in it. Then as soon as war broke out it was the pro-Nazis of yesterday who were repeating horror stories, while the anti-Nazis suddenly found themselves doubting whether the Gestapo really existed. Nor was this solely the result of the Russo-German Pact. It was partly because before the war the Left had wrongly believed that Britain and Germany would never fight and were therefore able to be anti-German and anti-British simultaneously; partly also because official war-propaganda, with its disgusting hypocrisy and self-righteousness, always tends to make thinking people sympathize with the enemy. Part of the price we paid for the systematic lying of 1914-17 was the exaggerated pro-German reaction which followed. During the years 1918-33 you were hooted at in left-wing circles if you suggested that Germany bore even a fraction of responsibility for the war. In all the denunciations of Versailles I listened to during those years I don’t think I ever once heard the question, “What would have happened if Germany had won?” even mentioned, let alone discussed. So also with atrocities. The truth, it is felt, becomes untruth when your enemy utters it. Recently I noticed that the very people who swallowed any and every horror story about the Japanese in Nanking in 1937 refused to believe exactly the same stories about Hong Kong in 1942. There was even a tendency to feel that the Nanking atrocities had become, as it were, retrospectively untrue because the British Government now drew attention to them.

But unfortunately the truth about atrocities is far worse than that they are lied about and made into propaganda. The truth is that they happen. The fact often adduced as a reason for scepticism — that the same horror stories come up in war after war — merely makes it rather more likely that these stories are true. Evidently they are widespread fantasies, and war provides an opportunity of putting them into practice. Also, although it has ceased to be fashionable to say so, there is little question that what one may roughly call the “whites” commit far more and worse atrocities than the “reds”. There is not the slightest doubt, for instance, about the behaviour of the Japanese in China. Nor is there much doubt about the long tale of Fascist outrages during the last ten years in Europe. The volume of testimony is enormous, and a respectable proportion of it comes from the German press and radio. These things really happened, that is the thing to keep one’s eye on. They happened even though Lord Halifax said they happened. The raping and butchering in Chinese cities, the tortures in the cellars of the Gestapo, the elderly Jewish professors flung into cesspools, the machine-gunning of refugees along the Spanish roads — they all happened, and they did not happen any the less because the Daily Telegraph has suddenly found out about them when it is five years too late.

George Orwell, “Looking back on the Spanish War”, New Road, 1943 (republished in England, Your England and Other Essays, 1953).

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