Quotulatiousness

March 31, 2021

British Commandos – Men of the Hunter Class – WW2 Special

Filed under: Britain, History, Military, WW2 — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 04:00

World War Two
Published 30 Mar 2021

After the German take over continental Europe, the British invent the commando, a new soldier type to raid and harass German installations in occupied Europe.

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Hosted by: Indy Neidell
Written by: Joram Appel
Director: Astrid Deinhard
Producers: Astrid Deinhard and Spartacus Olsson
Executive Producers: Astrid Deinhard, Indy Neidell, Spartacus Olsson, Bodo Rittenauer
Creative Producer: Maria Kyhle
Post-Production Director: Wieke Kapteijns
Research by: Joram Appel
Edited by: Karolina Dołęga
Sound design: Marek Kamiński
Map animations: Eastory (https://www.youtube.com/c/eastory​)

Colorizations by:
– Daniel Weiss

Sources:
– Imperial War Museums: N 3, HU41240, A 26238, H17472, B 5203, H 19272, CH 10705, H 17489, D 8893, H 39031, A 17763, H 17502, TR1425, E 6390,E 6404, H 31439, TR1230, ADM 5072, H39029, H 17485, H 17347, H 022592, H 17511,H 22588, H 019284, H19269, NA 12466, N 530, NA12469, H18957, H 22604, A 27469, NA 379 A,N397 1941, C2352,H 17364, 023574,H 039033
– Bundesarchiv
– National Archives NARA
– National Military Museum
– Icons from the Noun Project: barge by Seb Chmiel, soldier by Wonmo Kang,
– Crickets sound courtesy of damonmensch
– Slide projector courtesy of hpebley3

Soundtracks from the EpidemicSound:
– “London” – Howard Harper-Barnes
– “March Of The Brave 10” – Rannar Sillard
– “Rememberance” – Fabien Tell
– “The Inspector 4” – Johannes Bornlöf

Archive by Screenocean/Reuters https://www.screenocean.com​.

A TimeGhost chronological documentary produced by OnLion Entertainment GmbH.

“Rosalie”: Trench Art SMLE with a Most Improbable Story

Filed under: Cancon, History, Military, Weapons, WW1 — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Forgotten Weapons
Published 21 Dec 2020

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Henri Lecorre was a French immigrant to Canada who enlisted in the 22nd Regiment of the Canadian Army in April, 1915. He had a knack for carving things in his rifles, which he started right in basic training, with a Ross rifle he named “Josephine”. That got him sternly rebuked by his Colonel, but he would take up the habit again in 1916 when he arrived in France and began to see combat. At this point the Canadians were issuing SMLE rifles, and Lecorre named his “Rosalie”, after the French bayonet’s nickname.

Lecorre served through 14 major campaigns, and carved each name into his rifle as the years of the war dragged on. He was twice caught and punished for destruction of government property and fined for the cost of the rifle, although he managed to avoid more serious punishment both times. He only embellished the left side of Rosalie, so that his work would be hidden against his leg when standing at attention. By the summer of 1918, Rosalie’s service record included Vimy, Kemmel, St. Eloi, Hoodge, Zellebeck, Courcelette, Bully Grenay, Neuvilles Vaade, Mericour, Lievin, Lens, Cote 70, Passchendaele and Arras.

Fate eventually caught up to Private Lecorre, and in mid-1918 he was seriously wounded in an attack, and woke up in a military hospital in Dieppe. Rosalie was long gone, and Lecorre did not return to combat again.

The story is far from over, however. Rosalie was recovered from the battlefield, and sent back to Enfield with a batch of damaged rifles for refurbishment and reissue. Someone in the factory noticed the carving on it, and it was set aside. The arsenal commander took a liking to it, and it was hung in his office — where it remained for some 30 years. A Canadian officer from the 22nd Regiment noticed it at Enfield — thanks to Lecorre carving his unit’s name into it — during the Second World War, and thought it would be appropriate to return it to the unit’s home town, where the Citadelle Museum was established in 1950, with Rosalie as one of its original exhibits.

In 1956, Lecorre himself happened to visit an exhibition near Quebec City where the museum had set up, and was shocked to see his own Rosalie on display. After some understandable difficulty convincing the officer on duty that it was actually *his* rifle (which Lecorre did by reciting back its serial number unseen), a remarkable reunion took place. The rifle remained with the museum, but now with its full story known. It remains there to this day, on permanent display.

The Citadelle Museum commissioned a reproduction of Rosalie to be used for demonstrations, and it is this rifle which was graciously made available to me for filming, as the original is inaccessible on short notice because of its display case. Many thanks to the Citadelle for the opportunity to present it to you! If you are in Quebec City, make sure to take time to visit them:

https://www.lacitadelle.qc.ca/en/

Contact:
Forgotten Weapons
6281 N. Oracle #36270
Tucson, AZ 85740

QotD: The first and only “inalienable” right

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

Oversimplifying a bit for clarity, “republican” political philosophy after Hobbes is an attempt to use Hobbes’s tools and methods without arriving at his conclusions. That baloney about “inalienable rights” in the US Declaration of Independence is the most famous of these attempts. If you want to know how we got from there to here – from the Founders to the Tyranny of the Intersectional Genderfluids – just recall what those supposedly “inalienable” rights are: Life, Liberty, the Pursuit of Happiness.

It would’ve been far better to have kept the trio in Locke’s original words – life, liberty, and property – but even that wouldn’t have saved us, because the proposition is flawed from the beginning. The full quote is:

    We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness …

… and pretty much all of that is wrong.

As we’ve seen, it was a major part of Hobbes’s project to prove that men do in fact have such rights, because it’s not at all “self-evident.” That was the whole point of the Wars of Religion – heretics have NO rights, because they have put themselves beyond the pale of the human community. For the Wars of Religion to end, political legitimacy had to be secularized.

That was Hobbes’s goal. That’s what the “State of Nature” thought experiment was about. Does man has any rights in himself, that flow only from his existence as a human being? In other words, does he have rights NOT endowed by his Creator?

Hobbes argued that we DO have such rights, of course … but, crucially, we only have the full exercise of them in the State of Nature. For Hobbes, all rights are, at bottom, the right to self-defense. Getting out of the State of Nature involves laying at least part of that right down – “alienating” it, in the Latinate English of the 17th century – creating in the process a “corporate person” who “represents” us all. Far from being “inalienable,” then, Life and Liberty, at least, have to be alienated, at least to some degree, if civilization is to exist at all …

… at least according to Hobbes, and do you see what I mean about people trying to adopt his terms while dumping his conclusions?
Hobbes had plenty of examples to hand, writing as he was in the last, nastiest phase of the Wars of Religion. According to Hobbes, the Leviathan – who, let’s recall, can be a Senate or something just as easily as a monarch – absolutely has the right to your life and liberty, since your voluntary surrender of them is what creates the Leviathan in the first place. How else could wars be fought in the gunpowder age? A medieval king leading his personal affinity into battle didn’t have to worry about political theory. An Early Modern king, fielding armies of tens of thousands, did. Without an animating ideology, they’re just mercenaries – ask Machiavelli how that works out.

We’ll skip over that “pursuit of happiness” crap, since that’s probably just Jefferson’s noodle-headed way of alluding to Classical political theory, and circle back to the start: “all men are created equal.” As we’ve seen, this was central to Hobbes’s “State of Nature” thought experiment … but, as is obvious to anyone with real-world experience, it only applies there.

Severian, “Hobbes (II)”, Founding Questions, 2020-12-11.

March 30, 2021

Caesar in Britain II: There and Back Again (54 B.C.E.)

Filed under: Britain, Europe, France, History, Military — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Historia Civilis
Published 21 Mar 2017

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Music is:
“Day Bird,” by Broke For Free
“Drums of the Deep,” by Kevin MacLeod
“Flood,” by Jahzzar

Leaky labs and the WHO’s whitewash efforts

Filed under: China, Health, History, Media — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In the latest NP Platformed newsletter, Colby Cosh outlines some of the historic “diseases escaping from the lab” events that certainly allow us to be … dubious about the WHO maintaining the line that the Wuhan Coronavirus was “unlikely” to have escaped from the biological lab in Wuhan:

The original SARS virus, which terrorized Canada in 2003, has escaped from laboratories and infected humans at least six times since its successful suppression in the wild — once in Singapore, once in Taiwan and four times from one laboratory in Beijing.

And then there’s the great enigma in the history of infectious disease (maybe the second greatest — I for one would still really like to know what the English sweat was). How in blazes did the H1N1 flu virus come back? A strain of H1N1 was responsible for the Spanish flu of 1918-19; it lingered in human populations and continued to evolve until it was seemingly supplanted by a cousin, H2N2, which swept the world during the 1957-58 “Asian flu.”

H1N1 just plain vanished for two decades, then reappeared rather puzzlingly in Russia in 1977, causing a “Russian flu” pandemic and 700,000 deaths. This strain wasn’t especially lethal, but it knocked those too young to have natural immunity to H1N1 flat on their rears. Since then, H1N1 has been endemic in humans — it is incorporated as a matter of course into seasonal flu vaccines — and modern genetic analysis shows that the 1977 strain of H1N1 was, DNA-wise, pretty much a carbon copy of H1N1 strains from before the Asian flu years.

The “Russian flu” therefore almost certainly cannot have reappeared naturally, since it had undergone almost no discernible evolution. It probably crossed into Siberia from (wait for it) mainland China, which was then not yet a WHO member state. Some analysts think this may have happened because of a lab leak. Others think it more likely that it was a botched effort to create an H1N1 vaccine from old samples; H1N1 had crossed over to a small number of humans in the United States in 1976, creating the famous “swine flu” scare.

Still others ask: uh, is the difference between a lab leak and a botched vaccination experiment particularly meaningful? The general public may not know it, but a pandemic originating in a research laboratory isn’t just a hypothetical. It has not only happened, but there’s a decent chance that you, personally, have suffered from the resulting disease.

Tank Chats # 101 | Irish Leyland Armoured Car | The Tank Museum

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

The Tank Museum
Published 9 Apr 2020

Here David Fletcher discusses the Leyland Armoured Car which was produced in the 1930s for the Irish Army, but with some alterations, saw service right through to the 1980s.

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QotD: Static societies and disruptive outsiders

Filed under: Books, Britain, Economics, Government, History, Japan, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

In 1981, the social scientist Mancur Olson published his magisterial The Rise and Decline of Nations: Economic Growth, Stagflation, and Social Rigidities. Olson had already won acclaim for The Logic of Collective Action, which explained why some groups received an outsize slice of the political pie. In his new book, Olson turned to the question of why nations fail. His thesis: nations lost dynamism when insiders managed to stack the rules against disruptive outsiders.

Stable societies with unchanged boundaries, Olson observed, “tend to accumulate more collusions and organizations for collective action over time.” Instead of accepting rules that encourage overall growth, these collusive organizations — trade groups and labor unions were paradigmatic examples — fight to keep what they have, slowing down “a society’s capacity to adopt new technologies and to reallocate resources in response to changing conditions,” thus reducing economic efficiency. Decline follows.

Olson pointed to Japanese stagnation under the Tokugawa shogunate, when, “before Admiral Perry’s gunboats appeared in 1854, the Japanese were virtually closed off from the international economy.” Ruling Japanese society, he writes, “were any number of powerful za, or guilds, and the shogunate or the daimyo often strengthened them by selling them monopoly rights.” The guilds “fixed prices, restricted production and controlled entry in essentially the same way as cartelistic organization elsewhere.”

A second example: Great Britain, “the major nation with the longest immunity from dictatorship, invasion and revolution” and, consequently, Olson explained, suffering “this century a lower rate of growth than other large, developed democracies.” In Olson’s view, the weak performance resulted from limits on change established by a “powerful network of special-interest organizations,” which included labor unions, industrial groups, and aristocratic cliques. By the 1970s, after the conservative government of Edward Heath fell in a losing battle with striking miners, many deemed Britain ungovernable. Olson contrasted the British situation with that of postwar Germany and Japan, where the chaos and destruction of wartime defeat wiped away established industrial and retail groups, leaving the field open to newcomers like Soichiro Honda or the Albrecht family (creators of international supermarket giant Aldi), who could work economic magic.

The word “ungovernable” was also used to describe New York in the 1960s and 1970s, when Mike Quill’s transit union ran roughshod over Mayor John Lindsay’s attempts to control public-sector wage growth. New York was a long-established city with lots of political collusion. The old Tammany Hall could broker deals to keep Gotham going, but Lindsay’s successor, Abe Beame, proved too weak to resist any special interest that wanted more spending or government favors. New York’s spending kept rising even as public services worsened, until bankruptcy loomed and public power wound up in the hands of the unelected Municipal Assistance Corporation. Thankfully, New York reformed itself economically, at least to some extent, under Mayors Rudolph Giuliani and Michael Bloomberg, as Britain did under Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. Sufficiently strong leaders can buck entrenched insiders.

Edward L. Glaeser, “How to Fix American Capitalism”, City Journal, 2020-12-13.

March 29, 2021

Caesar in Britain (55 B.C.E.)

Filed under: Britain, Europe, France, History, Military — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Historia Civilis
Published 22 Feb 2017

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Music is:
“Light Thought var 2,” by Kevin MacLeod
“Bird Day,” by Broke For Free
“Drums of the Deep,” by Kevin MacLeod
“Thinking Music,” by Kevin MacLeod
“Flood,” by Jahzzar
“Hallon,” by Christian Bjoerklund

Requiring only men to register for the draft isn’t the real problem — the problem is the draft itself

Filed under: Liberty, Military, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Kerry McDonald fears that the current challenges to the gender inequality of the US draft may end up making the underlying problem worse:

US Selective Service draft notice for J.D. Schmidt, dated 24 September, 1970.
Wikimedia Commons.

Currently, all American men are required to register for the draft through the Selective Service System when they turn 18, and could be forced into military service if the draft was activated. As a mom with young sons, I shudder at this prospect.

Lawyers with the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) have filed a petition asking the Supreme Court to rule the current military draft registration unconstitutional because it requires only men to register, not women. As a mom with young daughters, I shudder at this prospect.

While draft registration does involve unequal treatment of men and women, and women have been ably serving in the military for years, including in full combat, the larger issue is Selective Service registration itself. Current draft registration may be unconstitutional, but it shouldn’t exist at all.

Forcing citizens into any kind of non-voluntary work or action is antithetical to the principles of a free society.

Some contend that conscription is necessary to defend those principles if there were not enough volunteers to serve in a wartime effort, but is slavery ever justifiable? Who decides? If there are not enough soldiers to willingly fight a war, should the war be fought?

Nobel-Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman was one of the key figures who succeeded in persuading the US to move to an all-volunteer army in 1973, arguing against military conscription. Friedman wrote that “any system involving compulsion is basically inconsistent with a free society.” He went on to argue: “The continued use of compulsion is undesirable and unnecessary. We can and should man our armed forces with volunteers.”

In place of conscription, Friedman advocated for a voluntary military guided by free-market ideas. “The appropriate free market arrangement is volunteer military forces; which is to say, hiring men to serve,” Friedman wrote in his book, Capitalism and Freedom. “There is no justification for not paying whatever price is necessary to attract the required number of men. Present arrangements are inequitable and arbitrary, seriously interfere with the freedom of young men to shape their lives, and probably are even more costly than the market alternative.”

Friedman’s advocacy against conscription came to a climax in testimony with Army Chief of Staff, General William Westmoreland. The general disagreed with Friedman by claiming that the economist’s free-market approach would be akin to leading an army of mercenaries. Friedman replied: “General, would you rather command an army of slaves?”

The Bayeux Tapestry – all of it, from start to finish

Filed under: Britain, France, History, Humour — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Lindybeige
Published 18 Oct 2017

A complete guide to the story as depicted on the famous Bayeux Tapestry. There is a lot more to it than just the Battle of Hastings.

Support me on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/Lindybeige

Other than The Adventures of Stoke Mandeville, this is the longest editing job I have ever done. It took eleven very long days of work to put this together from the opportunist footage I snatched when changing trains near the museum where it is on display. The shoot was not without its problems, one of which was the fact that because the tapestry is behind glass, and the museum has many illuminated displays, the reflections in the glass were a bane, and I didn’t manage to get rid of them all. Another was that my stills camera refused to work after taking a small number of pictures. It had always worked fine before, and has always worked fine since. It wasn’t the battery and it wasn’t the SD card. It was a mystery.

For the curious, the edit involved seventeen tracks on the timeline, and has twenty-two animated scenes. Unfortunately, the main animation software I was using could not handle full HD images, and so there is a slight loss of picture quality during most of the animated scenes. You will notice that the close-ups have a better picture quality than the wide shots. This is because they were taken with the camera pushed up against the glass, which improved focussing, and got rid of almost all of the haze and reflections caused by the glass.

It is important to understand that this ‘tapestry’ is a piece of propaganda, and does not tell an accurate version of events. The story I tell here is the one depicted, not what actually happened.

I have enough material for more videos on the tapestry, but am in no great hurry to spend many more days editing this difficult footage. Trying to match the writing and speaking of narration to panning camerawork that had no notion when shot of what might need to be said about some passing scene, was a nightmare, and many editing compromises had to be made, with some scenes skipped past quickly, and others drawn out.

Clarification on the nudity: I said that the figure under the mysterious Cleric and woman was the the only figure displaying genitals on the tapestry. This was misleading. Several animals clearly are pictured with genitals, and on the tapestry in Bayeux today it looks as though a couple of other human figures have genitals. Some of these may have been added later, and these are not being ‘displayed’ as the displaying figure is clearly doing, but look more incidental.

I describe the tall figure emerging from the building with a lance and pennant, being brought his horse, as “William”. It occurred to me after making the video that all the sources I consulted describe this figure as William, but the text does not name him as William, so possibly he is just a Norman knight, representing any and all of the knights setting out for the battle, and that this figure is meant to be “William” could be a modern tradition that has become accepted fact just by repetition.

Buy the music – the music played at the end of my videos is now available here: https://lindybeige.bandcamp.com/track…

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: Modern conservatism is merely progressive policies on a ten-year delay

Filed under: Politics, Quotations, USA — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 01:00

In 2000, when the Vermont Supreme Court mandated same-sex “civil unions”, American conservatives were outraged. By 2010, when the left had moved on to gay marriage, conservatives were supportive of civil unions but insisted marriage was an ancient institution between a man and a woman. Now, the left having won that one and moved on to transgenderism, conservatives profess to be a bit queasy about transitioning grade-schoolers.

So you can take it to the bank that by 2030 rock-ribbed Republicans will be on board with penises in the girls’ changing rooms, but determined to hold the line against whatever the left’s next cause du jour is: human cloning, mandatory transitioning for delinquent boys, voting rights for animals.

There really isn’t much point to conservatism that’s just leftism ten years late, is there? It’s like that ITV+1 satellite service they have in Britain that offers you the ITV schedule but an hour later, in case you were caught in traffic heading home. If you’re considering on which side to bestow your tribal loyalty, the left is right quicker; the right is left behind — but only for a few years until they throw in the towel. If you’re all headed to the same destination, why not ride first class on the TGV instead of the creaking, jerking stopping service? Justin Trudeau’s vapid modishness was perfectly distilled by his campaign catchphrase of four years ago: “Because it’s 2015.” But that beats waiting till 2025 to say “Because it’s 2015”.

Mark Steyn, “Catch-Up Conservatism”, SteynOnline, 2020-12-17.

March 28, 2021

New Blitzkrieg Against a Wall of 9 Million! – WW2 – 135 – March 27, 1942

Filed under: Europe, Germany, History, Japan, Military, Russia, USA, WW2 — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

World War Two
Published 27 Mar 2021

The Allies make plans to bring the war to Germany by possibly attacking in North Africa. Holding Malta might be the key to such adventures, but it is increasingly harder to do. The Soviets and German make plans for adding millions of soldiers to their ranks, while springtime mud has kept the front mostly quiet. The Japanese plans for the conquest of Burma are still advancing, though the fighting this week is especially brutal.

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Follow WW2 day by day on Instagram @ww2_day_by_day – https://www.instagram.com/ww2_day_by_day
Between 2 Wars: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list…
Source list: http://bit.ly/WW2sources

Written and Hosted by: Indy Neidell
Director: Astrid Deinhard
Producers: Astrid Deinhard and Spartacus Olsson
Executive Producers: Astrid Deinhard, Indy Neidell, Spartacus Olsson, Bodo Rittenauer
Creative Producer: Maria Kyhle
Post-Production Director: Wieke Kapteijns
Research by: Indy Neidell
Edited by: Iryna Dulka
Sound design: Marek Kamiński
Map animations: Eastory (https://www.youtube.com/c/eastory​)

Colorizations by:
– Daniel Weiss
– Adrien Fillon – https://www.instagram.com/adrien.colo…​
– Norman Stewart – https://oldtimesincolor.blogspot.com/​

Sources:
– Narodowe Archiwum Cyfrowe
– IWM: TR153
– Arrow by Dolly Holmes, Factory by Adrien Coquet – from the Noun Project

Soundtracks from the Epidemic Sound:
– Rannar Sillard – “Easy Target”
– Johan Hynynen – “Dark Beginning”
– Gunnar Johnsen – “Not Safe Yet”
– Howard Harper-Barnes – “London”
– Philip Ayers – “Ominous”
– Flouw – “A Far Cry”
– Jo Wandrini – “Dragon King”
– Craft Case – “Secret Cargo”
– Howard Harper-Barnes – “Underlying Truth”

Archive by Screenocean/Reuters https://www.screenocean.com​.

A TimeGhost chronological documentary produced by OnLion Entertainment GmbH.

“Canadians are largely full of shit on climate change”

Filed under: Cancon, Environment, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

The Line wraps up the week with, among other things, an explanation of why they didn’t cover anything to do with the “Conservative” Party’s virtual convention:

We said in last week’s dispatch that we were monitoring the Conservative Party of Canada’s virtual convention, and that we’d bring you any commentary that it warranted. We brought you no such commentary this week. Draw your own conclusions.

We will say, this, though. We think the kerfuffle about the party delegates’ vote to not affirm their belief in climate change is overblown, for two big reasons. The first is that Canadians are largely full of shit on climate change. Yes, it’s true that polls indicate we are concerned about the issue — Very Concerned, even. But polls also show how much we’re actually willing to do about it, and the answer is, not a fuck of a lot.

The second point we’d make is that every Conservative convention comes with warnings of deep splits within the party, with long features by Toronto- or Ottawa-based writers explaining how out of touch Tories are with “mainstream Canadians” like them, how unelectable they are outside their western base, and so on and so on. We agree that the Tories have problems, and it’s clear that not everybody is happy inside that big blue tent (or any big tent). But the Conservatives won the popular vote last time, and though Brownface Trudeau did a lot of the heavy lifting don’t forget: Andrew Scheer was the CPC leader. Can we suggest that one comes out a wash?

Don’t read too much into the doom and gloom that surrounds every CPC convention. There are always stories just like the climate change one, and if you don’t believe us, just recall that long-ago era of, ahem, one week ago, when all the coverage was warning that pro-life insurgents in the party were going to hijack the agenda and cause a meltdown by chanting about abortion all weekend.

Didn’t happen. Went nowhere. We suspect the coverage of the climate change issue, though unhelpful and awkward, will vanish just as quickly now that the chattering classes, ourselves included, have filed the obligatory quota of “convention stories” and moved on to something more interesting (which is almost anything).

TARIFFS and TAXES: The REAL Cause of the CIVIL WAR?!

Filed under: History, Humour, Military, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Atun-Shei Films
Published 16 Jan 2020

Checkmate, Lincolnites! Debunking the Lost Cause myth that the American Civil War was fought over taxes and protectionist tariffs. Was the South subjected to disproportionate taxation? Did the Morrill Tariff cause secession? Watch and find out, you no-account, yellow-bellied sesech!

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QotD: Laïcité and French Catholicism

Filed under: France, History, Quotations, Religion — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 01:00

What of Catholicism in France? Soundly defeated by the Third Republic in 1905 with the introduction of Laïcité, are there Catholics (and other Christians) who secretly wish to see secularism get a bloody nose by way of the Islamists?

As I said, “secularism” isn’t a real thing. I am an optimist when it comes to French Catholicism. There is a rising generation of young Catholics, and they are excellent, and numerous. More and more people are understanding that the only thing modernity offers is consumer crap from China, divorce, and joyless sex at best. The churches on Sunday are full in the big cities. Houellebecq is right; for us, the future is either the foot of the Cross, or submission to Islam. And I think we’re showing we don’t want to submit to Islam …

What people don’t understand about French Catholicism is that while 1905 was certainly a defeat, French Catholics did not simply disappear. They abandoned politics, but they did continue to have children, to bring them up into Catholic schools, etc. so there has always been an important Catholic subculture, including at the elite levels. I am optimistic about the future of Catholicism in France.

Niccolo Soldo, “The Zürich Interviews – Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry: Unrepentant Baguette Merchant”, Fisted by Foucault, 2020-12-02.

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