World War Two
Published 12 Jun 2021It’s a week of starts and stops. The Battle of Sevastopol kicks into high gear, and the Battle of Gazala enters its third phase. And what is going on in the Pacific just one week after Midway?
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June 13, 2021
Sevastopol Must Fall! – WW2 – 146 – June 13, 1942
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Fundamentally unserious nation – “… for Canada’s leaders, all the world’s a ‘gram”
In the Friday wrap-up edition of The Line, a consideration of how shallow, insincere posturing, and performing became the hallmarks of Canadian government leadership:
Typical image search results for “Justin Trudeau socks”
Look, we at The Line are as tired as you are about the more, shall we say, theatrical aspects of Justin Trudeau’s approach to being prime minister. Whether it was his Day One “because it’s 2015!” smirk, his obsession with showing off his socks to foreign dignitaries, his fashion sense while vacationing in India, and countless other Trudeauvian trips of the light fantastic, the man has always seemed more interested in performance than in the substance of governing.
But that’s not quite right. Because if there is one thing we’ve come to realize over the past five years and a bit, it is that for the Trudeau Liberals, the performance is the governing. For example, we used to wonder at the amount of time and energy that Cabinet ministers spent working on their Instagram accounts, since it went far beyond what would seem to be necessary for promoting and communicating policy. But once we understood that it was the job of policy to promote the Instagram account, and not the other way around, all of this proudly vacuous behaviour started to make a lot more sense.
But while we’ve gotten more or less used to it here in Canada (or maybe the right word is “numb”), we’ve always wondered how it looks through foreign eyes. Those abstract wonderings became a little more concrete over the past few weeks. Countries are opening up, people are starting to travel, politicians are going back to their old habits of holding regular meetings to make sure the world is still ticking along. And for Canada’s leaders, all the world’s a ‘gram.
So it was that at the G7 summit in Cornwall England this week, Prime-Minister-In-All-But-Name Chrystia Freeland was the only finance minster to wear a mask in a group photo taken outdoors. Ok, we thought, maybe she’s not fully vaxxed, maybe she has reason to be extra cautious. Except in a string of photos taken just before the official photo, Freeland was captured scrambling to put on her mask, not for safety, but for show.
Freeland was just getting the crowd warmed up for her nominal boss, Justin Trudeau. At his official G7 welcome on Friday, Trudeau was the only leader to put a mask on to give Boris Johnson the chummy elbow, only to remove it a few seconds later. We get it. It’s a version of the old “what lie did I tell?” problem, but for acting. Which audience am I playing to at this exact moment? It’s hard for even an old luvvie like Trudeau to keep track.
Once he’s back in Canada, Trudeau is going to hole up in a hotel for a few days, which the Globe‘s Cam Clark aptly referred to as “symbolic penance for a symbolic policy.” We agree with Clark that there’s some good fun in seeing someone get tied up in their own moral posturing. But while Clark is unhappy at the prospect of the prime minister cooling his heels for three days, we’re less fussed about Trudeau’s prospective stay in Hotel Q. Because while Clark thinks “there are real things” for the prime minister to be doing, we doubt that very much.
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Wartime Changes: The Bren MkI Modified and Bren MkII
Forgotten Weapons
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The British lost some 90% of their stock of Bren light machine guns in the disastrous Dunkirk evacuation, and in the following months rushed to rearm. Part of this program was a two-tiered simplification of the Bren design. First was a MkI Modified Bren (which was not marked any differently than the original MkI), and this was followed by a MkII design. These patterns simplified many of the machining operation required to produce the Bren, significantly reducing the number of required machining operations. The most visually distinctive elements of the MkII pattern were the omission of the stainless steel flash hider assembly and the replacement of the original dial rear sight with a simple ladder sight. In addition, changes were made to the buttstock, buttplate, receiver profile, gas block, and bipod. Both Enfield and Inglis would produce the simpler MkII Brens by the middle of the war. Despite the many changes made, the core operating components (bolt, bolt carrier, etc) were left unchanged, so they could still interchange between all patterns of the gun in service.
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QotD: Defending the undefendable – Brutalist architecture
I have recently collected quite a number of articles online and in the press in favor of brutalism. I did so without having made any special effort, and without finding anything like the same number of countervailing articles against it, albeit that the great mass of the population, in my view rightly, detests brutalism. The penultimate paragraph of one of the recent articles that I have seen in favor of brutalism — the employment of great slabs of concrete in the construction of buildings — goes as follows:
The newly-gained attractivity [of architectural brutalism] is growing by the day. In troubled times where societal divides are stronger than ever around the globe and in a world where instantaneous rhymes with tenuous, brutalism offers a grounded style. It’s a simple, massive and timeless base upon which one can feel safe, it’s reassuring.
It is rather difficult to argue with, let alone refute, the vague propositions of such a paragraph, which nevertheless intends (I imagine) to connote approval and judgment based upon sophisticated, wide, and deep intellectual considerations. But what exactly is a “grounded style” in contrast to a “world where instantaneous rhymes with tenuous”? This is verbiage, if not outright verbigeration, though it might serve to intimidate those with little confidence in their own judgment. The idea that brute concrete could create any kind of security rather than unease or fear is laughable.
When defenders of or apologists for brutalism illustrate their articles with supposed masterpieces of the genre, it is hardly a coincidence that they do so with pictures of buildings utterly devoid of human beings. A human being would be about as out of place in such a picture, and a fortiori in such a building, as he would be in a textbook of Euclidean geometry, and would be as welcome as a termite in a wooden floor or a policeman in a thieves’ kitchen. For such defenders and apologists of brutalism, architecture is a matter of the application of an abstract principle alone, and they see the results through the lenses of their abstraction, which they cherish as others cherish their pet.
Theodore Dalrymple, “The Brutalist Strain”, Taki’s Magazine, 2019-11-02.
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