The Tank Museum
Published 24 May 2020Director Richard Smith looks at Percy Hobart and the incredible weapon he was issued on joining the Home Guard at the start of WW2; a bayonet welded to a pole. Major General Percy Hobart commanded the 79th Armoured Division and gave the revolutionary, specialised tanks used on D-Day their nickname “Hobart’s Funnies”.
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June 23, 2020
Defending Britain with a Bayonet | Hobart’s Pike | The Tank Museum
The “Battle of Dijon”
I post a lot of accounts of ancient and modern wars and battles, but the “Battle of Dijon” actually took place earlier this month and has been widely mischaracterized in the media, as John Lichfield recounts:
Dijon, the capital of Burgundy, rarely attracts the world’s attention. There is Dijon mustard of course. There is Dijon blackcurrant liqueur (Cassis de Dijon). There are many beautiful, old Burgundian streets and buildings. But of all the medium to large cities in France, Dijon (population: 159,000) is surely the least talked about.
Then, abruptly, last weekend Dijon had the great misfortune to become newsworthy. War broke out, we were told, between “Chechen gangs” and “Arab gangs”. The dispute was, some French media reported, about the right to traffic drugs. The Daily Mail announced that the French army had been sent in to restore order. Marine Le Pen compared Dijon to Beirut. Similar “wars between migrant communities” now threatened, she said, all over France.
All these reports were, I believe, wrong or deeply misleading. What did happen in Dijon over four days the other weekend was surreal and disturbing. But the incidents defy simple explanation or political point-scoring. They say, perhaps, more about Chechnya, and the values — good and bad — of exiled Chechens, than they do about the wider racial issues of France. The severity of the violence probably owed something to the frustrations of France’s recent nine weeks of Covid lockdown. The political and media reaction was skewed by the fact that the events occurred while France was in the midst of a debate about race and policing – in the wake of the George Floyd killing in the United States.
On Sunday evening, on the third night of violence in Dijon, President Emmanuel Macron happened to be addressing the nation on TV. He said, among many other things, that he would resist all pressure to splinter France into ethnic communities.
So what had happened over four days in Dijon? There are several conflicting accounts. Here, briefly, are the facts that I have been able to establish.
On 9th June a 15-year-old (some say 16-year-old) boy of Chechen origin was badly beaten up outside a chicha (hookah) bar in central Dijon. His attackers were local men in their 30s of African and North African origin. According to the Chechen version of events, the men were drug-dealers. The injured boy apparently had no connection with drugs. The dealers attacked him because local Chechens were known to be hostile to drug-trafficking. They put a gun in the boy’s mouth and said: “We hate Chechens. We’re going to let you live so you can tell the other Chechens what’s going to happen to them.”
Three days later a convoy of cars arrived in Dijon packed with Chechen men from several other parts of France, as well as Belgium and Germany. Local media and police say that there were 100 of them; the Chechens say that there were only 15. They smashed up the chicha bar, assaulted its owner and then rampaged through the multi-racial Les Grésilles area of council estates just north-east of central Dijon.
Pushback for Chinese aggression in the Himalayas
In Quillette, Cleo Paskal outlines the Chinese military action last week and a few of the reactions in civil society:
High in the Himalayan mountains, Chinese soldiers ambushed Indian troops this week, resulting in a brutal battle on the Indian side of their shared border. Twenty Indians were killed, while China won’t disclose its losses. It was the deadliest confrontation on the border in over 40 years. As a result, some Indian strategists are openly discussing recognizing Taiwan and providing more visibility to the Dalai Lama, state-owned telecoms are blocking Chinese equipment from 4G upgrades, and millions of Indians downloaded an app that helps remove Chinese apps from their phones (before Google removed it). All of this comes at a time when much of the world remains angry at China’s leaders for their initial handling of the COVID-19 crisis.
This week’s apparent provocation is part of a larger recent pattern with China. From the South China Sea, to Taiwan, to Hong Kong, Beijing has been seeking to change facts on the ground in a way that benefits its own strategic and economic interests. In a recent Atlantic Council discussion of the India-China border issue (convened before the latest fighting), senior American diplomat Ambassador Alice Wells summed the situation up well: “There’s a method here to Chinese operations. [A]nd it is that constant aggression, the constant attempt to shift the norms, to shift what is the status quo, that has to be resisted.”
For decades China has tried to expand its strategic reach along its de facto south-western border through the invasion of Tibet, land swaps with Pakistan, and war with India. To this end, China treats British Empire-era maps as political props to variously brandish or dismiss, as best suits Beijing’s goals. For example, it effectively accepted the 1914-era McMahon Line delineation in its border agreement with Myanmar, but rejects it with India.
The Line of Actual Control (LAC) separating China and India runs through rugged, high-altitude terrain that has witnessed multiple conflicts going back to the 1962 India-China border war. In recent weeks, there have been Chinese incursions at several points along the LAC, reportedly involving thousands of troops. In some spots, the Chinese military is digging in on the Indian side, while expanding its already considerable support infrastructure on their side of the LAC.
Delhi is particularly concerned about Chinese advances near India’s Daulat Beg Oldie (DBO) high-altitude military airfield, an essential Indian forward base that provides oversight of the strategic Karakoram Highway (KH) linking China’s western Xinjiang Autonomous Region with Pakistan, including the Gwadar Port on the Indian Ocean. It is a key component of the multi-billion-dollar China-Pakistan Economic Corridor.
Legends Summarized: The Journey To The West (Part VII)
Overly Sarcastic Productions
Published 27 Dec 2019Journey to the West Kai, episode 4: Trouble in Taoist Town!
Thrills! Excitement! Pigsy takes a bath! Sandy fights an alligator! Monkey helps Tripitaka cheat on a high-stakes game show! And as always, everyone forgets about the horse!
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QotD: Scientific discoveries despite “research” and “planning”
We live in a culture of “research” and “planning.” I’m not against honest research (which is rare), but mortally opposed to “planning.” The best it can ever achieve is failure, when some achievement comes despite its ham-fisted efforts. Countless billions, yanked from the taxpayers’ pockets, and collected through highly professional, tear-jerking campaigns, are spent “trying to find a cure” for this or that. When and if it comes, it is invariably the product of some nerd somewhere, with a messy lab. Should it be noticed at all, more billions will be spent appropriating the credit, or more likely, suppressing it for giving “false hope.” The regulators will be called in, as the police are to a crime scene.
For from the “planning” point of view, the little nerd has endangered billions of dollars in funding, and thus the livelihoods of innumerable bureaucratic drudges. That is, after all, why they retain the China Wall of lawyers: to prevent unplanned events from happening. But glory glory, sometimes they happen anyway.
David Warren, “That’s funny”, Essays in Idleness, 2018-03-08.