Quotulatiousness

December 3, 2019

The Hungarian Romanian War & The Downfall of the Hungarian Soviet Republic I THE GREAT WAR 1919

Filed under: Europe, History, Military — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 06:00

The Great War
Published 2 Dec 2019

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In early 1919 Hungary was one of the European territories that saw a communist revolution. Bela Kun and his supporters established the Hungarian Soviet Republic while the country was in great turmoil and fighting against the Romanians, the Czechoslovaks, the Serbs and within Hungary itself.

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» SOURCES
Balogh, Eva S. “István Friedrich and the Hungarian Coup d’État of 1919: A Reevaluation” in Slavic Review, 1 June 1976, Vol.35(2): 269-286.

Borodziej, Wlodzimierz and Maciej Gorny. Der Vergessene Weltkrieg. Europas Osten 1912-1923. Band II – Nationen 1917-1923 (wbg Theiss, 2018).

Gosztony, Peter. “The Collapse of the Hungarian Red Army,” in Pastor, Peter, ed. Revolutions and Interventions in Hungary and its Neighbor States, 1918-1919 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988): 69-80.

Hetes, Tibor. “The Northern Campaign of the Hungarian Red Army,” in Pastor, Peter, ed. Revolutions and Interventions in Hungary and its Neighbor States, 1918-1919 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988): 55-60.

Horthy, Admiral Nicholas. Admiral Nicholas Horthy Memoirs. Simon Publications LLC, (2000).

Macmillan, Margaret. The Peacemakers: Six Months that Changed the World (London: John Murray, 2001).

Nouzille, Jean. “The July Campaign of the Hungarian Red Army as seen by France,” in Pastor, Peter, ed. Revolutions and Interventions in Hungary and its Neighbor States, 1918-1919 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988): 81-88.

Révész, Tamás: “Post-war Turmoil and Violence (Hungary)”, in: 1914-1918-online. International Encyclopedia of the First World War, ed. by Ute Daniel, Peter Gatrell, Oliver Janz, Heather Jones, Jennifer Keene, Alan Kramer, and Bill Nasson, issued by Freie Universität Berlin, Berlin 2019-08-05.
https://encyclopedia.1914-1918-online…

Torrey, Glenn. “The Romanian Intervention in Hungary, 1919,” in Pastor, Peter, ed. Revolutions and Interventions in Hungary and its Neighbor States, 1918-1919 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988): 301-320.

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Canada and China

Filed under: Cancon, China, Economics, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Ted Campbell discusses Canadian foreign policies — or perhaps more accurately Canada’s lack of policies — on China:

“The Chinese People’s Liberation Army is the great school of Mao Zedong Thought”, 1969.
A poster from the Cultural Revolution, featuring an image of Chairman Mao, published by the government of the People’s Republic of China.
Image via Wikimedia Commons.

There were many things that history might find regrettable about the Mulroney years but I doubt that it will fault him for having a principled and coherent foreign policy.

That all changed with Jean Chrétien, who was almost a neo-mercantilist, and for whom principle could never stand in the way of profit.

In the modern (Chrétien-Martin-Harper-Trudeau) era, Conservatives have been, broadly, anti-China, sometimes for reasons that are less than coherent or principled, and Liberals have been too prepared to “go along to get along” with China. This is because both parties reflect the incoherent views of the whole country. But political leaders shouldn’t (mustn’t) just reflect the views of their voters ~ that sort of populism is nonsensical ~ they must, as Edmund Burke said, bring his or her “unbiased opinion … mature judgment … [and] … enlightened conscience” to bear on each issue. But I’m afraid that too many (most?) modern Canadian political tacticians hold all those things in scant regard.

In the 2020s Canadians must listen to a few clear voices who will tell them that China is a competitor in many “markets” including in the marketplace of ideas, ideals, institutions and values. The current Chinese leadership is overtly hostile to Weterm liberal-democratic values and is not unwilling to punish any country with which it disagrees. It is protectionist, relatively rich and growing in military, political and economic power, but, still, somewhat cautious, and Xi Jinping’s China seems to be able to separate its own short-term political interests from its firm, long term, strategic goals. China, as Kevin Rudd reminded us just a few days ago “is contemptuous of weakness and prevarication,” which explains why it is so obviously contemptuous of Justin Trudeau’s Canadian government.

It is a fact that the Sino-Canadian relationship is “unbalanced:” China is a great power, Canada is not; China is an autocracy, Canada is a democracy; and so on but, as Kevin Rudd said (link just above) “China too has net strengths and weaknesses of which … [our] … strategists should be aware in framing our own strategy … [and we] … should be equally aware of our own strengths, weaknesses and vulnerabilities.” Canadian strategists need to educate Canadians about China so that a solid, informed majority will want a coherent and principled policy ~ one that puts our national vital interests first […]

Our policy towards China needs to be just one part of a coherent, principled foreign policy which Canadians understand and, broadly, support, and that, in turn, needs to be part of a Canadian grand strategy that aims to secure a place, as Paul Martin suggested, “of pride and influence in the world” ~ that, of course, was a place we enjoyed under St Laurent, Diefenbaker and Pearson, all of whom were acutely aware of the many and varied (and very divergent) views about Canada in the world that existed then and persist today in Canada’s many and varied communities.

Czechoslovakia – the Last Bastion of Democracy | BETWEEN 2 WARS I 1935 Part 1 of 4

Filed under: Europe, Germany, History — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

TimeGhost History
Published 2 Dec 2019

Czechoslovakia is holding on to democracy by a thread. It even looks like they might be able to integrate the German Czechoslovakians, but Hitler’s rise to power changes everything.

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From the comments:

TimeGhost History
2 days ago
The year is 1935 CE. Central Europe is entirely dominated by Authoritarians and Fascists. Well not entirely! One small country of indomitable Czechs and Slovaks still holds out for democracy. And life is not easy for the German Nazis who garrison the towns and villages in Bohemia and Moravia…

One thing in this episode might go unnoticed. It is how important it is to note that the term Sudeten German has only become widespread after WWI. It shows us how the delicate balance of ethnic groups had been upset after the Great War.

Before 1918, these same people felt comfortable called themselves Bohemian or Moravian. On the other side of the border that now divides Czechoslovakia from Germany, Austria, Poland and Hungary Czech and Slovak speakers felt comfortable calling themselves for instance Carpathian, Silesian, or Bavarian. In only 17 years this regional sense of unity has now been eradicated. It’s really easy to fall into the trap of the identity rhetoric of the time. To say that “Well, what did you expect? You forced people to be part of a country that wasn’t theirs” it’s an easy explanation for all of this conflict.

Well as we have often pointed out it wasn’t that simple. Fanned by identity politics on all sides, the borders have become fevering soars that are spreading infection into all of Europe. It is a disease that now threatens to develop into sepsis for the whole European continent. And think of this; borders are nothing but lines on maps, things invented arbitrarily in people’s minds… isn’t it remarkable how we as a species can invent our own demise?

“Useful idiots” during the Cold War

Filed under: Economics, History, Politics, Russia, USA — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Robert Reilly reviews Judgement in Moscow: Soviet Crimes and Western Complicity by Vladimir Bukovsky, which has recently been republished in English:

Krushchev, Brezhnev and other Soviet leaders review the Revolution parade in Red Square, 1962.
LIFE magazine photo by Stan Wayman.

Judgment In Moscow contains autobiographical elements but is principally concerned with providing and analyzing documentary evidence for what should have been the USSR equivalent of what the Nuremberg Trials had been for Nazi Germany. In 1991, Bukovsky returned to the Soviet Union to take part in the “trial of the communist party” that was held in 1992. In an audacious move the Communist Party had sued then-President Boris Yeltsin to get its property back. To prepare a defense, Yeltsin ordered that the secret Central Committee archives be opened to Bukovsky. The order was obeyed, but only partially and for a short time. The trial fizzled, but Bukovsky, with the aid of a hand-held scanner, was able to gather many thousands of pages of top-secret Central Committee and Politburo documents and get them out of Russia. Some of these key documents are what we have in this priceless book. They are eye-opening.

During the Cold War, we had to speculate as to why, for instance, the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan and how the decision was made. Now we know for certain. Bukovsky provides the minutes of the Politburo meetings in which the invasion was decided. The Reagan administration was highly skeptical of détente and was therefore criticized for war-mongering. The skepticism was well-placed because, as the documents reveal, détente was simply a façade for advancing Soviet power and manipulating Western publics and governments against the Reagan plan to place Pershing IIs and cruise missiles in Europe to defend it against burgeoning Soviet power, including the SS-20s.

The revelations of the extent to which the Soviet Union manipulated the “peace” movement in the West should be an embarrassment to its participants, who may have been too naïve at the time to know how they were being used. Others, of course, acceded to being used, or even cravenly sought to be used. The names of some of these useful idiots are in the documents.

Another thing these documents disclose, much to the embarrassment of many American Sovietologists, is that there were no “hawks” and “doves” in the Kremlin — a premise on which they had banked their academic careers. The unanimity of the Politburo decisions reveals that the senior Soviet leaders were all of one stripe. It was to their advantage to create the impression that there were hawks and doves so that they could game the policies of Western governments and the opinions of its publics. For instance, providing Western credits to the USSR — it was thought by many so-called Russian experts in the West — would strengthen the doves in the Kremlin, whereas denying credits would empower the hawks. By buying this line of thought, the West was induced to keep the Soviet Union on life-support for more than a decade past what would have been its earlier collapse, according to Bukovsky.

No one was a greater master of this deception than Mikael Gorbachev. The minutes from many Politburo meetings chaired by Gorbachev show that glasnost and perestroika were façades constructed to ensure the continued existence of the Soviet Union through even more Western subsidies. And it worked to the extent that credits and subsidies ballooned under the Western illusion that Gorbachev had to be supported to ensure his success — ignorant of the fact that Gorbachev conceived of success in ways inimical to Western freedom.

H/T to Blazing Cat Fur for the link.

Turkish Conehammer “Broomhandle” C96 Mauser

Filed under: Europe, Germany, History, Military, Weapons — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Forgotten Weapons
Published 13 Oct 2019

This is Lot 2493 in the upcoming October Morphy Extraordinary auction.

The “cone hammer” was the first commercial version of the Mauser C96, so named for the stepped conical sides of its hammer. The C96 did not sell particularly well in the first few years after its introduction, and the only major bulk sale was to Sultan Abdul Hamid II of the Ottoman Empire, who bought 1,000 of the guns for his palace guard. These guns were numbered in Farsi in their own range from 1 to 1000, and were all sold with matching shoulder stocks. The order was signed in December of 1897 and the guns were shipped a few months later, in May of 1898.

Under the Sultan’s rule, there was significant concern over potential military coups, and most arms were locked away in armories, including many of the C96 pistols. After the revolution in 1908/9, guns were more liberally distributed to the military and police, and these C96 pistols were issued out to both groups for service use. Some were used in combat in World War One, and after the war they were considered surplus, available for purchase inexpensively by Army or police officers. This meant that they saw a lot of use, and as a result few survive today, with many of them in rather rough condition.

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QotD: Defending freedom of speech

Filed under: Law, Liberty, Quotations — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

H.L. Mencken in 1928.
Photo by Ben Pinchot for Theatre Magazine, August 1928.

The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one’s time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is to be stopped at all.

H.L. Mencken.

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