Quotulatiousness

July 8, 2022

Dutch government clearly has been cribbing notes from Justin Trudeau’s brownshirt tactics for dealing with unarmed protests

Filed under: Europe, Government, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

For such a big story, the revolt of the Dutch farmers doesn’t seem to be getting as much international coverage as you might expect … almost as though governments and the tame mainstream media are trying to hide it:

Whether it’s the Netherlands or Canada, the story is the same across the globe. Over the past several years, elitists occupying positions of power within governments have grown accustomed to imposing their will on ordinary citizens.

It doesn’t matter that they’re blatantly violating the social contract established by their own people. For the elitist, the only item on the agenda is maintaining power and dominion over the populace, whom they view as nothing more than subjects meant to obey their diktats without question.

Avoiding such power grabs, however, requires a vigilant citizenry, whose dedication to liberty must be stronger and more widespread than elitists’ devotion to tyranny. As witnessed during the Covid regime, compliance with the state gives birth to more draconian edicts, which only continue to erode the line between democracy and oligarchy.

Make no mistake, if the Dutch farmer protesters let their foot off the gas for one second, the state will not hesitate to shove their alarmist, degrowth policies down the people’s throats without remorse. Any form of surrender will likely continue to enable more overreaching policies, which will undoubtedly infringe upon the everyday lives of Dutch people.

The other day it was reported that police had opened fire on a tractor driven by a 16-year-old. Today, the young man was released from custody without charges:

Farmers’ protests in the Netherlands have reached the royal palace at Dam Square in Amsterdam. 16-year old Jouke, who was shot at by a police officer on Tuesday, was released without charges.

Opposition leader Geert Wilders released a bombshell letter showing the globalist Dutch government wants to use expropriated agricultural land for asylum centers.

Around 40,000 Dutch farmers paralyzed traffic in the Netherlands and blocked around 20 food distribution centers over the weekend with trucks and tractors. Yesterday the protests reached Dam Square in Amsterdam and the seat of government in The Hague. The airport in Groningen was blockaded by demonstrators on Wednesday, German farmers joined the protests in Heerenberg near the Dutch-German border.

In an incident near the blockaded food distribution center at Heerenveen in Friesland, police officers shot at 16-year-old Jouke’s tractor, which was already turning away from the roadblock, missing the boy’s head by an inch (Gateway Pundit reported). Jouke and two other protestors were arrested on suspicion of “attempted manslaughter” after which an angry crowd gathered in front of the police station in Leeuwarden. All three have now been released without charges.

A farmer in Leeuwarden told Canadian journalist Keean Bexte that the Rutte government had “created a climate where the police think they can shoot”. Dutch farmers are being dispossessed and committing suicide, the protester said, while China, for example, fails to meet any environmental regulations.

[…]

Sky News Australia host Rowan Dean compared the Dutch police tactics to the violent quashing of Canadian trucker protests by uparmored riot police, calling Premiers Trudeau and Marc Rutte the “golden pin-up boys for Klaus Schwab and the globalist fantasists of the World Economic Forum.”

“The similarities between Canada and Holland are as startling as they are disturbing,” Dean said. “Only a few months ago, it was the Canadian government that attacked its own citizens in the most grotesque and terrifyingly authoritarian manner during the so-called Truckers’ Convoy when the government actually froze the bank accounts and basically starved out any individuals in what was legitimate peaceful democratic opposition to Covid (vaccine) mandates. That ended badly for Trudeau.”

At the World Economic Forum in Davos 2021, Dutch PM Marc Rutte had boasted about “Holland’s involvement with the World Economic Forum’s Global Food Innovation Hubs, which is busily ‘transforming food systems and land use'”, Dean said.

At Ace of Spades H.Q., J.J. Sefton had this to say about the protests and the repressive measures taken by the Dutch and Canadian governments toward peaceful protestors:

Mind you, this is in Holland. I’m no ethnographer, but the Netherlands is a country and people that are about as liberal, peaceful and secular as they come. Like many other European nations, they atoned for the collective guilt over what happened to its Jews during the war (among other things) by opening its borders to a massive influx of Muslim immigrants with predictable results. Strange how what happened to Theo Van Gogh was all but ignored and someone like Geert Wilders is vilified. Yet with this green madness, somehow the people have woken up to the Globalist/EU wolf at their throat. The Dutch government’s response? Crush the farmers. You have to wonder what the reaction would have been had most or even some of them had been Muslim? Meh, Muslims don’t farm. But, think about it. This is Holland. Not North Korea, Cuba, Venezuela or Iran. Holland. A supposedly enlightened European democratic society that imposes its will on people and sets the water cannon and tear gas on them for daring to object.

Well, look at Canada only a few short months ago. In the wake of the truckers’ convoy protest over forced injections, how did Justin Castreau-cescu react? Arrests, confiscation of vehicles and bank accounts, among other things. Cana-fucking-da. Now look at what that maple syrup sucking hoser is up to:

    The Canadian government is funding a booklet being sent to schools across the country that teaches children to be wary of people who champion “free speech.”

    Yes, really.

It’s a Paul Joseph Watson video, hence the short quote. But it says it all. Holland is no longer Holland. Canada is no longer Canada and America is no longer America. You know it. They know it. The forces that hijacked those governments and societies know it. The question is not do they know that we know? Of course they know we know. Yet they are betting the farm that we are not going to do a damned thing about it. So, okay, J.J. What about this “optimism” thing? In a sense, as Dave in FL and CBD talked about, I am optimistic in that I understand that what cannot go on will not go on. And this crap for sure cannot go on.

In Spiked, Brendan O’Neill comments on the lack of interest among the people you’d expect to be most vocal in support of working people protesting against out-of-touch, arrogant elites:

If police were opening fire on protesters in a European nation, we would have heard about it, right? If there was a mass uprising of working people in a European Union country, taking to the streets in their thousands to cause disruption to roads, airports and parliament itself, it would be getting a lot of media coverage in the UK, wouldn’t it? The radical left would surely say something, too, given its claims to support ordinary people against The System. Cops shooting at working men and women whose only crime is that they pounded the streets to demand fairness and justice? There would be solidarity demos in the UK, for sure.

Well, all of this is happening, right now, in a nation that’s just an hour’s flight from Britain, and the media coverage here is notable by its absence. As for the left in Britain and elsewhere in Europe – there’s just silence. This is the story of the revolting Dutch farmers. These tractor-riding rebels have risen up against their government and its plans to introduce stringent environmental measures that they say will severely undermine their ability to make a living. They have been protesting for a couple of years now, but their fury has intensified in recent weeks. They’ve blocked motorways, blocked roads to airports, set fire to bales of hay, and descended on The Hague. Things are so serious that yesterday, in the province of Friesland, police opened fire. Mercifully, no one was injured.

There has been some reportage outside of the Netherlands, of course. But it has been strikingly muted. And it isn’t hard to see why. This is a people’s revolt against eco-tyranny, against the modern elite’s determination to slash “harmful” emissions with little regard for the consequences such action will have for working people and poor people. To the formers of elite consensus opinion, for whom environmentalism is tantamount to a religion, the sight of pesky little people rebelling against green diktats is too much to bear. So they either demonise these dissenters, as is happening in the Netherlands, or they ignore them in the hope they will go away, as is happening outside the Netherlands.

The farmers have a very good case. Their concern is that the government’s plans for slashing greenhouse gases will hit farming – and other industries – very hard indeed. The targets, introduced last month, commit the Netherlands to halving its use of nitrogen compounds by 2030. The government says emissions of nitrogen oxide and ammonia, both of which emanate from livestock, will need to be drastically cut. This will entail farmers getting rid of vast numbers of their livestock, potentially devastating their livelihoods. Fishermen are concerned, too. As of next year, fishing permits will be given out on the basis of the eco-friendliness of the trawler the fisherman is using, and many are worried that they’ll end up permit-less, unable to earn a living. They have blocked harbours in solidarity with the farmers. The construction industry could also suffer. Courts have blocked numerous infrastructure projects on the basis that the emissions they cause will breach the new eco-rules.

The Early Emperors – Part 7: The Imperial Women

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

seangabb
Published 11 Jan 2022

The Roman Empire was the last and the greatest of the ancient empires. It is the origin from which springs the history of Western Europe and those nations that descend from Western Europe. It is the political entity within which the Christian Faith was born, and the growth of the Church within the Empire, and its eventual establishment as the sole faith of the Empire, have left an indelible impression on all modern denominations. Its history, together with that of the ancient Greeks and the Jews, is our history. To understand how the Empire emerged from a great though finally dysfunctional republic, and how it was consolidated by its early rulers, is partly how we understand ourselves.

Here is a series of lectures given by Sean Gabb in late 2021, in which he discusses and tries to explain the achievement of the early Emperors. For reasons of politeness and data protection, all student contributions have been removed.

More by Sean Gabb on the Ancient World: https://www.classicstuition.co.uk/

Learn Latin or Greek or both with him: https://www.udemy.com/user/sean-gabb/

His historical novels (under the pen name “Richard Blake”): https://www.amazon.co.uk/Richard-Blak…

The Russian way of war

Filed under: Europe, Military, Russia — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In First Things, George Weigel identifies what we’ve learned about the Russian “way of war” from the ongoing conflict with Ukraine:

Four and a half months after Russia invaded Ukraine on the Orwellian pretext of displacing a “Nazi” regime — a regime that enjoys a democratic legitimacy absent from Russia for two decades — what have we learned about, and from, the Russian way of war?

We have learned that the Russian way of war is inept strategically, tactically, and logistically: an army using inferior equipment, bereft of competent non-commissioned officers, and replete with ill-trained draftees; an army that relies on brute force to bludgeon its way toward its objectives. We have learned that the Russian way of war willfully obliterates cities and deliberately destroys economic infrastructure. We have learned that the Russian way of war targets hospitals and schools, cultural and educational institutions, churches, synagogues, and mosques in an attempt to eradicate a culture and a nation that Russian president Vladimir Putin insists has no right to exist, save as a Russian vassal. Thus the twenty-first-century Russian way of war breathes the spirit of eighteenth-century imperialism, with President Putin comparing himself to that quintessential Russian imperialist, Peter the Great, and telling schoolchildren asked to name Russia’s borders in a geography bee that “the borders of Russia never end”.

We have learned that the Russian way of war is insensible to casualty rates, its own army’s and Ukraine’s. We have learned that the Russian way of war includes abandoning the Russian dead or disposing of their remains in mobile cremation units, so that body bags don’t flood the home front and raise questions about the wisdom of Putin and his generals. We have learned that the Russian way of war includes the humiliation, torture, and probable execution of prisoners of war. We have learned that the Geneva Conventions on the humane treatment of POWs mean no more to the Russian military and its political masters than does the Fifth Commandment.

We have learned that the Russian way of war includes the use of cluster munitions and unguided missiles specifically forbidden by international law. Thus the Russian way of war systematically violates the two in bello (war-fighting) principles of the just war tradition: proportionality of means (no more force than necessary to achieve a legitimate military objective) and discrimination (non-combatant immunity). We have learned that the Russian way of war features widespread rape, gross theft, and the summary execution of civilians, as well as kidnapping civilians in Russian-occupied territories, relocating them, and attempting to coerce them into renouncing their Ukrainian allegiance.

We have learned that the Russian way of war includes illegal blockades of Ukrainian ports to prevent grain shipments, thus threatening starvation in Third World countries. We have learned that the Russian way of war includes energy blackmail, threats of nuclear-weapons use, and blatant bullying of other countries, including Lithuania and Kazakhstan.

The Missing Rings • The Story Of The 1969 Minnesota Vikings

Filed under: Football, Sports, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Randy Fast
Published 28 May 2016

I know that this video has already been posted on YouTube, but for those of you that have never seen it, here’s a great documentary by NFL Films on the 1969 Minnesota Vikings season. I was only seven at the time, and professional football wasn’t quite yet on my radar, but for hardcore Vikings fans, the finale of this season must have been a pretty hard pill to swallow. Anyway, I hope YouTube/NFL Films allows me to keep this video posted, so until then…

QotD: Sparta’s vaunted hoplite phalanx differed little from hoplite armies from other Greek cities

Filed under: Europe, Greece, History, Military, Quotations — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

The hoplite phalanx was the common fighting style of essentially all Greek poleis. It was not unique to Sparta.

That comes with all sorts of implications. The Spartans used the same military equipment as all of the other Greeks: a thrusting spear (the dory), a backup sword (a xiphos or kopis; pop-culture tends to give Spartans the kopis because it looks cool, but there is no reason to suppose they preferred it), body armor (either textile or a bronze breastplate), one of an array of common Greek helmet styles, and possibly greaves. We might expect the Spartiates – being essentially very wealthy Greeks – to have equipment on the high end of the quality scale, but the Perioikoi, and other underclasses who fought with (and generally outnumbered) the Spartiates will have made up the normal contingent of “poor hoplites” probably common for any polis army.

Xenophon somewhat oddly stops to note that the Spartiates were to carry a bronze shield (kalken aspida; Xen. Lac. 11.3 – this is sometimes translated as “brass” – it is the same word in Greek – but all Greek shield covers I know of are bronze). This is not the entire shield, as in [the movie] 300 – that would be far too heavy – but merely a thin (c. 0.25mm) facing on the shield. It’s odd that Xenophon feels the need to tell us this, because this was standard for Greek shields. Perhaps poorer hoplites couldn’t afford the bronze facing and used a cheaper material (very thin leather, essentially parchment, is common in many other shield traditions) and Xenophon is merely noting that all of the Spartiates were wealthy enough to afford the fancy and expensive sort of shield (it has also been supposed that elements of this passage have dropped out and it would have originally included a complete panoply, in which case Xenophon is just uncharacteristically belaboring the obvious).

The basics of the formation – spacing, depth and so on – also seem to have been essentially the same. The standard depth for a hoplite phalanx seems to have been eight (-ish; there’s a lot of variation). The Spartans seem to have followed similar divisions with a fairly wide range of depths, perhaps trending towards thinner lines in the fourth century than in the fifth, though certainty here is difficult. The drop in depth may be a consequence of manpower depletion, but it may also indicate a greater faith held by Spartan commanders of their line’s ability to hold. Depth in a formation is often about morale – the deeper formation feels safer, which improves cohesion.

It’s hard to say if the Spartan phalanx was more cohesive. It might have been, at least for the Spartiates. The lifestyle of the Spartiates likely created close bonds which might have aided in holding together in the stress of combat – but then, this was true of essentially every Greek polis to one degree or another. The best I can say on this point is that the Spartan battle record – discussed at length below – argues against any large advantage in cohesion.

That said, the Spartan battle order does seem to have been notably different in two respects:

First: it had a much higher ratio of officers to regular soldiers. This was clearly unusual and more than one ancient source remarks on the fact (Thuc. 5.68; Xen. Lac. 11.4-5, describing what may be slightly different command systems). Each file was under the command of the man in front of it (Xen. Lac. 11.5). Six files made an enomotia (commanded by an enomotarchos); two of these put together were commanded by a pentekonter (lit: commander of fifty, although he actually had 72 men under his command); two of those form a lochos (commanded by a lochagos) and four lochoi made a mora, commanded by a polemarchos (lit: war-leader) – there were six of these in Xenophon’s time. Compared to most Greek armies of the time, that’s a lot of officers, which leads to:

Second: it seems to have been able to maneuver somewhat more readily than a normal phalanx. This follows from the first. Smaller tactical subdivisions with more command personnel made the formation more agile. Xenophon clearly presents this ability as exceptional, and it does seem to have been (Xen. Lac. 11.4). Hoplite armies victorious on one flank often had real trouble reorganizing those victorious troops and wheeling them to flank and roll up the rest of the line (e.g. the Athenians at Delium, Thuc. 4.96.3-4). The Spartans were rather better at this (e.g. at Mantinea, Thuc. 5.73.1-4). They also seem to have been better at marching and moving in time.

Now, I do not want to over-sell this point. We’re comparing the Spartans to other hoplite forces which – in the fifth century especially – were essentially dumbfire missiles. The general (or generals) point the phalanx at the enemy, hit “go” and then hope for the best. Really effective command – what Everett Wheeler refers to as the general as “battle manager” – really emerges in the fourth century, mostly after Spartan power was already broken (E. Wheeler, “The General as Hoplite” in Armies of Classical Greece, ed. Wheeler (2007)). While “right wing, left wheel” is hardly the most complicated of maneuvers (especially given that the predictable rightward drift of hoplite armies in battle meant that it could be planned for), compared to the limitations of most hoplite forces, it marked the Spartans out as unusually adept.

More complicated Spartan maneuvers often went badly. Spartan forces at Plataea (479 – Hdt. 9.53) failed to effectively redeploy under orders, precipitating an unintended engagement. Plugging a gap in the line once the advance was already underway, but before battle was joined (something Roman armies did routinely) was also apparently beyond the capabilities of a Spartan army (Thuc. 5.72). While the Spartans are often shown in popular culture with innovative tactical formations – like the anti-cavalry wedge or anti-missile shield-ball (both of which, to be clear, are nonsense) formations in 300 – in practice the Spartan army was tactically uncreative. Like every other hoplite army, the Spartans formed a big rectangle of men and smashed it into the front of the enemy’s big rectangle of men. Notably, as we’ll see, the Spartans made limited and quite poor use of other arms, like light infantry or cavalry, even compared to other Greek poleis (and the bar here is very low, Greek combined arms, compared to say, Roman or Macedonian or Persian combined arms, was dismal). If anything, the Spartans were less adaptable than other hoplites.

Bret Devereaux, “Collections: This. Isn’t. Sparta. Part VI: Spartan Battle”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2019-09-20.

Powered by WordPress