[The Nazis], being Social Darwinists to the core, applied the military principle of Auftragstaktik to civilian life. “Mission-oriented” tactics means that the overall commanders leave as much as possible to the on-the-spot commanders, be they officers or noncoms, on the theory that properly-trained leaders will have a much better understanding of what needs to be done, and how to do it, than some general back at HQ. It’s the main reason the Wehrmacht could keep fighting so well, for so long, in the face of overwhelming opposition — tasks that would fall to an American company, or a Russian regiment, were often undertaken by a Wehrmacht platoon under the command of a senior corporal.
Obviously civilian life isn’t as goal-directed as the military in wartime, but a similar principle applied — given a vague set of generalized objectives from the top (Kershaw’s famous “working towards the Führer” thesis), everyone at every level was encouraged to move the ball downfield as he saw fit … with the added twist that, in the absence of a clearly defined, military-style chain of command, the various “subordinates” would ruthlessly battle it out with each other, Darwin-style, for bureaucratic supremacy.
Thus the Nazis’ infamous plate-of-spaghetti org charts. I’m not an expert, but I’m pretty sure there were more than a few guys who held wildly different ranks in various different organizations simultaneously. He might be a mere patrolman in the Order Police, but an officer in the SS, a noncom in the SA (you could be in both, at least in the early days), and so forth. I wouldn’t be surprised if there was more than one guy who technically reported to himself, somewhere deep in the bowels of the RHSA [Reich Security Main Office]. You could spend a lifetime trying to sort this stuff out …
Severian, “The Crisis of the Third Decade”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2021-03-18.
November 5, 2023
QotD: The Auftragstaktik principle of the Third Reich
November 4, 2023
MKb-42(H) Assault Rifle with ZF-41 scope
Forgotten Weapons
Published 31 Aug 2014The MKb-42(H), or Maschinenkarabiner-42 (Haenel), was the first production iteration of the German Sturmgewehr. It was chambered for the then-new 8x33mm kurz cartridge, and fired both semiauto and full-auto from an open bolt. Approximately 11,000 of these were made before production changed to the closed-bolt MP43.
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QotD: The munificent benefits of big government
This is the argument that government should run more of the economy of course.
No, don’t laugh, it is. Because these things are rising in price is exactly why, so the argument goes, government must regulate and control more, so as to lower the price.
Tim Worstall, “Ain’t Capitalism Great? Price Changes Over The Last 20 Years”, Continental Telegraph, 2019-07-13.
November 3, 2023
Understanding Combined Arms Warfare
Army University Press
Published 24 Mar 2023Designed to support the U.S. Army Captains Career Course, “Understanding Combined Arms Warfare” defines and outlines the important aspects of modern combined arms operations. This is not a complete history of combined arms warfare. It is intended to highlight the most important aspects of the subject.
The beginning of the documentary establishes a common understanding of combined arms warfare by discussing doctrinal and equipment developments in World War I. The second part compares the development of French and German Army mechanization during the interwar period and describes how each country fared during the Battle of France in 1940. The film concludes by showing how the United States applied combined arms operations in the European Theater in World War II.
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QotD: The use of Epigraphy and Papyrology in interpreting and understanding the ancient and classical world
Let’s start with the most text-like subcategories, beginning with epigraphy. Epigraphy is the study of words carved into durable materials like stone or metal. For cultures that do this (so, Mesopotamians, Egyptians, Greeks, Romans: Yes! Gauls, pre-Roman Iberians, ancient Steppe nomads: No!), epigraphy provides new texts to read and unlike the literary texts, we are discovering new epigraphic texts all the time. The downside is that the types of texts we recover epigraphically are generally very limited; mostly what we see are laws, decrees and lists. Narrative accounts of events are very rare, as is the epigraphic preservation of literature (though this does happen, particularly in Mesopotamia with texts written on clay tablets). That makes epigraphy really valuable as a source of legal texts (especially in Greece and Rome), but because the texts in question tend to be very narrowly written (again, we’re talking about a single law or a single decree; imagine trying to understand an act of Congress renaming a post office if you didn’t [know] what Congress was or what a post office was) without a lot of additional context, you often need literary texts to give you the context for the new inscription you are looking at.
The other issue with epigraphy is that it is very difficult to read and use, both because of wear and damage and also because these inscriptions were not always designed with readability in mind (most inscriptions are heavily abbreviated, written INALLCAPSWITHNOSPACESORPUNCTUATIONATALL). Consequently, getting from “stone with some writing on it” to an edited, usable Greek or Latin text generally requires specialists (epigraphers) to reconstruct the text, reconstructing missing words (based on the grammar and context around them) and making sense of what is there. Frankly, skilled epigraphers are practically magicians in terms of being able figure out, for instance, the word that needs to fit in a crack on a stone based on the words around it and the space available. Fortunately, epigraphic texts are published in a fairly complex notation system which clearly delineates the letters that are on the stone itself and those which have been guessed at (which we then all have to learn).
Related to this is papyrology and other related forms of paleography, which is to say the interpretation of bits of writing on other kinds of texts, though for the ancient Mediterranean this mostly means papyrus. The good news is that there is a fairly large corpus of this stuff, which includes a lot of every day documents (tax receipts! personal letters! census returns! literary fragments!). The bad news is that it is almost entirely restricted to Egypt, because while papyrus paper was used far beyond Egypt, it only survives in ultra-dry conditions like the Egyptian desert. Moreover, you have all of these little documents – how do you know if they are typical? Well, you need a very large sample of them. And then we’re back to preservation because the only place you have a very large sample is Egypt, which is strange. Unfortunately, Egypt is quite possibly the strangest place in the Ancient Mediterranean world and so papyrological evidence is frequently plagued by questions of applicability: sure we have good evidence on average household size in Roman Egypt, but how representative is that of the Roman Empire as a whole, given that Egypt is such an unusual place?
Outside of Egypt and a handful of sites (I can think of two) in England? Almost nothing. To top it all off, papyrology shares epigraphy’s problem that these texts are difficult and often require specialists to read and reconstruct them due to damage, old scripts and so on. The major problem is that the quantity of recovered papyrus has vastly outstripped the number of trained papyrologists, bottle-necking this source of evidence (also a lot of ancient papyri get traded on the antiquities black market, potentially destroying their provenance, and there is a special level in hell for people who buy black market antiquities).
Bret Devereaux, “Fireside Friday: March 26, 2021 (On the Nature of Ancient Evidence”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2021-03-26.
November 2, 2023
The carbon tax has been murdered, by Justin Trudeau, in the House, with a blatant self-interest
Rex Murphy believes the much-hated carbon tax — the Laurentian Elite’s revenge on working Canadians — has been dealt its mortal blow by the least likely suspect:
Justin Trudeau came into office on the spume of Canadian-level celebrity, built on a persona of ostentatious, idle gestures and token cheer (selfies, socks, costumes), the endless vocalization of woke crackerjack-box slogans and a smile cemented in place that had all the warmth of well-gelled cement. Just style. Style, understood as the adoption of surface mannerisms in place of deeply settled convictions, convictions built on a real attempt to understand Canada, to relate to all its regions, and an appreciation (which does not mean agreement) of the ideas, lifestyles and situations of mainstream Canadians: style adopted as a campaign dynamic.
It’s worth reminding that from the moment of its first swearing-in, the Liberal government has been an administration of show and tactics: tactics have been its policy, tactics have been its governing lifeblood. Policies — in so far as it can be said to have had policies — have been merely (temporary) scaffolding or window displays meant to shore up the tactics. They have not been, as with an honourable government, needful measures for Canadian well-being, shored up not by tactics but by their obvious benefit and their consonance with what Canadians made clear were their concerns.
Canada’s predominant commitment these past eight painful years, the “one ring to rule them all”, the only government commitment held with deepest conviction we have been told, has been combatting global warming. It is different. It is real policy. It is the core principle. It is immutable because its cause is existential. It has been Canada’s passport to an admiring progressive world. Above all it has absolutely glowed with virtue-signalling and superior progressive sensibility. It has been as good as a wristband was at a rock concert years back.
For all of his eight years Trudeau has incessantly promoted and promulgated his single cause. At home he has out-Suzukied David Suzuki, out-Mayed Elizabeth May, and there have been moments when he “out-dared” Greta. Abroad, he has been climate alarmism’s smiling Galahad.
Global warming has been his religion, and what he calls the carbon tax both eucharist and passport to net-zero paradise. To an increasingly skeptical Canadian public, anxious and distrustful of a government regularly racked by scandal and heroic mismanagement, he said (I paraphrase): “I know I’m taxing a necessity — heat for homes in northerly Canada — and I know it must hit the poor first and worst. But it’s to save the world! Saving the world keeps me up at night. And I want Canada to lead the way in saving it. And for that, there must be a tax on energy, on gas and oil, on heating. It must be done. It’s a sacrifice poets will write in praise of in the lower-temperature world we will be key to making happen.”
The tax on carbon dioxide — the great comedians of the Liberal party called it a “tax on pollution” — had to be imposed, even as inflation ravaged the country and further immiserated the already sufficiently immiserate, because Trudeau had a whole world to save. It was the signature element of the signature policy of Trudeau’s showcase government. It was the indispensable girder in building a post-oil-and-gas future for a post-nationalist Canada, the indestructible bridge to a golden net-zero tomorrow for our country. And, incidentally, a great shiny glittering Last Spike to doom Conservative Alberta’s economy and government, and no little whack for Saskatchewan.
This was principle as policy, and policy as principle. For seven plus years.
And now. A few fingers snapped somewhere and suddenly, Mr. Trudeau … cancels the carbon tax. Cancel for one and you must cancel for all.
With progressive allies like these …
In The Free Press, Suzy Weiss and Francesca Block record the reactions of progressive Jews who are waking up to discover that their “allies” hate them and want them dead:
After Donald Trump was elected, Emily Rose, 51, flew to New York with her daughters to walk in the Women’s March. She demonstrated on the streets of Minneapolis, where she lives, in the days after George Floyd’s murder. She donated money to small, black-led movements and social justice organizations that she believed in. She unlearned and then re-educated herself, as white Americans were instructed to, and read the teachings of anti-racist scholars like Ta-Nehisi Coates.
But then, after the massacre in Israel on October 7, when some 1,400 Jews were brutally murdered, not to mention the rapes, beheadings, and instances of torture, Rose began to notice something odd from the cohort of fellow progressives she admired: they were cheering for the other side.
“I started to see these intelligent, educated people, whose mission is to make our system better for people of color, suddenly posting all this anti-Israel, pro-Palestinian stuff,” Rose said. “I’m not changing my values, but screw the allyship. I will not stop fighting, because I believe in the causes themselves. But as for going out of my way to support, to post, to give money? I’m done.”
While professional politicos, like DSA founder Maurice Isserman, are publicly stepping down from their parties and denouncing organizations that justify, or even cheer, the events of October 7, and wealthy Jewish donors claw back their millions from elite universities that they say helped foment antisemitism on their campuses, there’s a quieter, more personal reckoning happening among progressive Jews. Like Rose, they feel betrayed by a left that they thought would have their backs.
Dov, 30, a Canadian musician who didn’t want to share her last name for privacy reasons, is transgender and a self-proclaimed “political progressive”. Since October 7, she says, “Every time I open Instagram I’m just like, blocking or deleting people that I thought I knew.” She calls anti-Zionism “cloaked antisemitism”.
Josh Gilman, 37, who lives in Arizona and prides himself on having friends across the political spectrum, says he has been muting even close friends who espouse anti-Zionist views. “I don’t need the emotional distress,” he told The Free Press. “If there’s someone who is truly my friend, it makes me feel that they very much don’t understand who I am as a person.” He’s cut out people he had invited to dinner at his home, and who he had trusted around his family and children.
“There’s a line in the sand, which is Israel,” he said.
Nate Clark, 34, lives in Virginia. He’s marched for gay rights, and in 2020, for the removal of statues of Confederate soldiers in his home state. He said his choice to stand up for others is rooted in his Jewish identity.
“As a Jew, I feel like it would be weird if I went to Germany and took a right turn down Hitler Avenue or saw a statue of Eichmann, and then hear people claim ‘Oh, it’s our history. We’re just proud of our history’?” he told me.
Since October 7, he’s found himself “politically homeless”.
Keeping Clean in Rome
seangabb
Published 2 Jul 2023A lecture, given in June 2023, about bathing and keeping clean in the Roman World — plus an overview of depilation and going to the toilet.
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QotD: Lowering the voting age
David Thompson, “Pudding First”, David Thompson, 2019-09-11.
November 1, 2023
They don’t actually offer post-grad studies in anti-semitism … formally, anyway
Glenn Reynolds on the somehow surprising-to-academics discovery that western universities are hotbeds of antisemitism:
UC Berkeley Law School Dean Erwin Chemerinsky is shocked, shocked at the amount of antisemitism present throughout elite academia.
Obviously, he hasn’t been reading my blog. Over 20 years ago I was running a series of posts tagged “Berkeley Hatewatch Update”, tracking hateful and antisemitic behavior at UC Berkeley.
Like this one:
Or this one:
To be fair, Erwin wasn’t Dean at Berkeley Law back then, when it was still called Boalt Hall.
[…]
So even in Chemerinsky’s own backyard, the signs have been there continuously for basically the entire 21st Century to date. If Chemerinsky read my blog, he’d have known about happenings there, and elsewhere throughout the higher education world, that apparently are news to him.
Well, to be fair, deans have more important things to do than read blogs. On the other hand, well, welcome to the party, pal. Pointing out the flourishing, toleration, and even encouragement of antisemitism in the higher education sector has largely been the function of “right wing” outlets. Mainstream and left-wing media (but I repeat myself) have had little desire to air the dirty laundry in public. And, anyway, they’re increasingly staffed with recent graduates from elite schools, steeped in Critical Race Theory, “decolonization” talk, and the like, who see this antisemitism (along with prejudice against Asians and “whiteness”) as natural and laudable, instead of as what it is, which is evil and un-American. The truth is that support for antisemitism and mass murder isn’t an aberration for the far left that dominates American campuses now. As Ilya Somin notes, it’s baked in: “It’s rooted in a long history of defending horrific mass murder and other atrocities”.
Canada’s (deliberate lack of) strategy
In The Line, Vincent Rigby discusses Canada’s notable lack of any kind of strategy to cope with an international situation that seems to be changing (or deteriorating, take your pick) at a rapid pace:
On the foreign policy front, the Canadian government unveiled its long-awaited Indo-Pacific Strategy almost a year ago. It was a welcome development for Canada’s role in a region at the epicentre of global events. But it was remarkably light on security and is now under severe stress given the serious diplomatic falling-out with India. But more importantly, where is Canada’s broader foreign policy? What will we do in other parts of a turbulent world to protect our security and values? How will we balance regional priorities? Canada has not produced a comprehensive foreign policy statement in 18 years.
On the defence front, Canada unveiled a new policy, Strong, Secure and Engaged, in 2017. After the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the government committed in April 2022 to produce an update to that policy in the following months. A year and a half later, Canadians are still waiting. In the meantime, officials have spoken publicly of possible cuts to the defence budget of $900 million a year over four years as part of broader government spending reductions. A severely stretched military may soon be stretched even further.
On the home front, Canada continues to lurch from crisis to crisis — the Freedom Convoy with its populist underpinnings, Chinese interference in federal elections, possible Indian complicity in the murder of a Canadian citizen, and now tension at home over the fighting in the Middle East. More than ever, Canada’s large diaspora communities feature prominently in security and foreign policy discussions. While Canadians await the findings of yet another public inquiry into the China affair, a broader strategy to confront national security threats is nowhere to be seen. Canada has not produced a national security policy in 19 years.
To be fair, the government has not sat idle during recent global developments. For example, it has ramped up its support to Ukraine (notwithstanding a slow start and the recent embarrassment in the House of Commons), taken measures to improve economic security, and established a National Security Council. But these efforts are all too often modest, piecemeal and reactive.
A Canadian senator famously quipped nearly a century ago that Canada was “a fireproof house far from inflammable materials”. It was barely true in the 1920s, and it is even less so today. But Canadians, despite all recent evidence to the contrary, apparently still believe this to be the case. They assume that the threats are not aimed at Canada, and that the U.S. would come to their rescue regardless. On both counts, such assumptions are dangerous, especially if Donald Trump were to return as president. The government, echoing the indifference of most Canadians, chooses to focus on domestic priorities, from increasing affordable housing to improving health care to fighting inflation. All are undeniably important. But as every prime minister declares, the government ultimately has no greater responsibility than the security of its citizens.
Canada needs an integrated, coherent strategy (or strategies), supported by appropriate resources and capabilities, to respond effectively both at home and overseas to this new world order. It will require trade-offs, but the case needs to be made to Canadians that the generation-long, post-Cold War peace dividend is no longer on offer. Our allies get that — so too must Canada. In the absence of such strategy, the security of Canadians will deteriorate further, and relationships with key NATO and Five-Eyes allies, already in peril, will suffer even more. If not careful, Canada may find itself more alone in the world than ever.
The BAR M1918A3 by Ohio Ordnance – Shooting and Mechanism
Forgotten Weapons
Published 13 Jul 2014Today we’re looking at one of Ohio Ordnance’s semiauto M1918A3 BARs – how it shoots, how it works, and what the pros and cons of the military BAR variants were in World War I and World War II.
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QotD: The original United States government
And in any case, that government – IF it worked as designed – lasted the span of one long-ish (then, average now) human lifetime: 1788-1861.
Most “political” problems, on this theory, can be boiled down to the attempt to retrofit old, unsuitable institutions to new creatures. To take the most basic example, that stuff about a “well-regulated militia” rests on the assumption – integral to a rough frontier society of Anglo-Celt misfits – that everyone is armed, and competent with their arms. This is simply not the case in a more settled society, with the higher information velocity that entails / requires, so we get all the endless wrangling over “gun control” (assuming anyone in that debate was ever arguing in good faith, which is also a big IF, etc.).
One obvious counter to this line of thought is to put it mostly down to technology – just as the Founders couldn’t imagine drones and ballistic missiles and “assault rifles” and the rest while they were writing the 2nd Amendment, so the problems with government can almost all be boiled down to old institutions trying to cope, not with new people, but with new technology.
Severian, “Bio-Marxism Grab Bag”, Founding Questions, 2021-01-21.
