PECO
Published 4 Aug 2020A look at the new driver experience courses on the Beer Heights Light Railway at Pecorama — summer 2020
August 5, 2020
Driver Experience @ Pecorama 2020
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Generalplan Ost, the Nazi plan to kill the Slavs – War Against Humanity 015 – July 1941, Part 02
World War Two
Published 4 Aug 2020In China, and the Soviet Union, all sides are causing widespread death to the local civilians. The defending forces are scorching the earth and plundering their own civilians, the attacking armed forces of Japan and Germany are executing planned genocide and mass destruction.
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Between 2 Wars: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list…
Source list: http://bit.ly/WW2sourcesWritten and Hosted by: Spartacus Olsson
Director: Astrid Deinhard
Producers: Astrid Deinhard and Spartacus Olsson
Executive Producers: Astrid Deinhard, Indy Neidell, Spartacus Olsson, Bodo Rittenauer
Creative Producer: Joram Appel
Post-Production Director: Wieke Kapteijns
Research by: Spartacus Olsson and Joram Appel
Edited by: Mikołaj Cackowski
Sound design: Marek Kamiński
Map animations: Eastory (https://www.youtube.com/c/eastory)Colorizations by:
Dememorabilia – https://www.instagram.com/dememorabilia/
Jaris Almazani (Artistic Man) – https://instagram.com/artistic.man?ig…
Julius Jääskeläinen – https://www.facebook.com/JJcolorization/
Daniel Weiss
Spartacus Olsson
Klimbim – https://www.flickr.com/photos/2215569…
Mikolaj UchmanSources:
Eesti Kirjandusmuuseum KM EKLA, A-3:107
Yad Vashem 55AO6, 74FO7,
Consiliul National pentru Studierea Arhivelor Securitatii (CNSAS)
USHMM
IWM NA 15129, N 530
from the Noun Project: Skull by Muhamad Ulum
Picture of a victim of starvation during the siege of Leningrad, courtesy George Shuklin
Portrait of Nikolai Moskvin, courtesy goskatalog.ruSoundtracks from the Epidemic Sound:
Johan Hynynen – “Dark Beginning”
Yi Nantiro – “Watchmen”
Yi Nantiro – “A Single Grain Of Rice”
Farell Wooten – “Blunt Object”
Reynard Seidel – “Deflection”
Andreas Jamsheree – “Guilty Shadows 4”
Philip Ayers – “Trapped in a Maze”
Skrya – “First Responders”
Philip Ayers – “Under the Dome”Archive by Screenocean/Reuters https://www.screenocean.com.
A TimeGhost chronological documentary produced by OnLion Entertainment GmbH.
From the comments:
World War Two
3 hours ago (edited)
So here we are — it’s the end of July and the Nazi plan to ethnically cleanse Eastern Europe by genocide and forced migration is now in play, while the deliberate genocide of the Chinese has been in motion for more than three years. It’s easy to write off the massive death in both regions as collateral damage, the millions of PoWs that died as callous carelessness, the overall death toll as part of a desperate defense strategies. But that belies how planned, meticulous and specific both the genocides by Imperial Japan and by Nazi Germany were.The sources detailing the execution and opposition to these plans in the Soviet Union are relatively easy to access. Already during the war the Allied intelligence services were intercepting most of the communication that outlined death tolls, policies, and events. After the war the comprehensive documentation by the Germans themselves was captured and compiled for the Nuremberg Trials. Although Russia under the current regime choose to obfuscate, and distort their side of the story, the decade after the collapse of the Soviet Union saw the release of enough classified material for us to know the big picture.
The sources on what happened in China are, on the other hand, harder to come by. Unlike Germany, Japan has not been forced to, and has been unwilling to reconcile with what their forefathers did. Historians unearthing these stories face massive opposition by interests that still try to maintain Japanese exceptionalism. In China, the Communist regime never collapsed, and continues to promote a propagandist historiography that distorts the events within a narrative of unilateral heroic struggle by the People’s Red Army against Imperialism. Therefore it’s all the more important that we try to see these events for what they were: a massive tragedy of human suffering caused by ideological chauvinism – there is nothing heroic here, only the sad reality of war, and the terror of hatred to the level of mass murder.
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Red Toryism, limited government and other Canadian political sinkholes
In his latest article in The Dominion, Ben Woodfinden talks about the political void where most Canadian conservatives keep their notions about what “conservatism” actually means in the Canadian context:
Parliament Hill in Ottawa.
Photo by S Nameirakpam via Wikimedia Commons.
This passage is from the Red Toryism essay:
Modern Canadian conservatism champions “small government”, seemingly without having any theory of what the state is actually for. Absent such a framework, it is difficult to identify governing priorities let alone to develop a philosophically coherent blueprint for action. When Conservatives get elected, they often have no idea of how to achieve the “fiscal responsibility” they preach. A series of ad hoc actions and policies follow, and the predictable result is failure to roll back the state in any significant or lasting way.
This, predictably, did not please everyone, and in a political landscape where we often still think that the divides between left and right are really about “big” versus “small” government, this was to be expected. But a conservative theory of government needs to escape this paradigm.
While conservatism is a broad tent, one unifying feature should be a commitment to limited government. But limited government is a term that often gets conflated with ideological “small government” that sees most of the modern state as illegitimate, and would eliminate most of it and leave the state to provide just the most minimal night-watchman functions. But small government, while a valid view to hold, is not limited government, and conservative government cannot just be about small government.
Limited government means constitutional government that is accountable and constrained by the rule of law, and while there are aspects of the modern state that need to be reformed, tamed, and limited, conservative government cannot just be about trying (and failing) to shrink the state. Conservatives have too often, I think, adopted the rhetoric of small government, without actually being true believers, and in the process they find it very difficult to actually reform and shape the state because they have put little thought into what government actually ought to be about.
Let me give you an example. Recently my friend Asher Honickman and I wrote a column for the National Post calling for a “parliamentary revival.” One specific and important reform we want to see is an expanded House of Commons to 500 MPs. More MPs would make for better party, and parliamentary government. But multiple people, including well connected conservatives, privately told us that while they think this is a good idea, one reason it won’t happen is because conservatives will just look at it through the lens of more spending of tax dollars on politicians. Instead the conservative impulse is to just try and shrink the size of legislatures to save a little bit of money.
In this case small government ideology actually gets in the way of reforms that would help make government more accountable, and limited. MPs should be held accountable and have their spending and salaries heavily scrutinized, but the cost of 150 more MPs would be nothing in the grand scheme of things.
This misses the point. More MPs would make for more accountable and better parliamentary government, and allow parliament, instead of both the bureaucracy and judiciary to increasingly take over more and more of lawmaking and governing that should be done by elected officials. The choice isn’t between more government or less government, in this case it’s a choice between who you’d rather be governed by; MPs who can scrutinize the government more, legislate with more freedom, and who you can hold to account, versus unelected bureaucrats with minimal oversight and limited accountability to elected officials.
In short, a conservative theory of governance should prioritize limited government, but in some cases this might require an attempt to strengthen (and more spending) on certain parts of government to constrain other parts.
It’s a rare Canadian conservative who’s willing to be quoted as saying that any part of human life is not automatically part of the remit of the federal government … how do you carve a “limited” government philosphy out of that?
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Berserkers! The facts and the fictions
Lindybeige
Published 16 Jul 2015Support me on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/Lindybeige
This one has been a long time coming, but now I’m glad that I’ve said it. It may disappoint many die-easy fans of unnecessary carnage, but the truth about berserkers is that they may have been a great deal more sensible and human than the rage-fuelled psychos so beloved by the world’s male teenagers.
Here’s a link to Roderick Dale’s new Viking book (although Amazon inaccurately describes it as an audiobook and abridged): http://www.amazon.co.uk/Viking-Experi…
For those wanting the full 100,000-word thesis, try here: http://eprints.nottingham.ac.uk/28819/
Lindybeige: a channel of archaeology, ancient and medieval warfare, rants, swing dance, travelogues, evolution, and whatever else occurs to me to make.
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QotD: Responsibility
I have always been deeply suspicious of the word “responsibility”. It has again and again sounded like someone else telling me that I must do what he wants me to do rather than what I want to do. If he is paying my wages, then fair enough. But if he is explaining why I should vote for him, and support everything he does once he has got the job he is seeking, not so fair.
The sort of thing I mean is when a British Conservative Party politician says, perhaps to a room full of people who, like me, take the idea of personal liberty very seriously: Yes, I believe, passionately, in personal liberty. The politician maybe then expands upon this idea, often with regard to how commercial life works far better if people engaged in commerce are able to make their own decisions about which projects they will undertake and which risks they will walk towards and which risks they will avoid. If business is all coerced, it won’t be nearly so beneficial. We will all get poorer. Yay freedom.
But.
But … “responsibility”. We should all have freedom, yes, but we also have, or should have, “responsibility”. Sometimes there then follows a list of things that we should do or should refrain from doing, for each of which alleged responsibility there is a law which he favours and which we must obey. At other times, such a list is merely implied. So, freedom, but not freedom.
The problem with politicians talking about responsibility is that their particular concern is and should be the law, law being organised compulsion. And too often, their talk of responsibility serves only to drag into prominence yet more laws about what people must and must not do with their lives. But because the word “responsibility” sounds so virtuous, this list of anti-freedom laws becomes hard to argue against, even inside one’s own head. Am I opposed to “responsibility”? Increasingly, I have found myself saying: To hell with it. Yes.
I have often been similarly resistant to the language of Christianity, of the sort that dominates what is being said in churches around the world today. How many times in history have acts of tyranny been justified by the tyrant saying something like: We must all bear our crosses in life, and here, this cross is yours. “God is on my side. Obey my orders.” The truth about the potential of life to inflict pain becomes the excuse to inflict further pain.
Brian Micklethwait, “Jordan Peterson on responsibility – and on why it is important that he is not a politician”, Samizdata, 2018-03-30.
