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
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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.

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