Quotulatiousness

March 2, 2024

Get your new election narratives! Hot off the press!

Filed under: Books, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Chris Bray isn’t impressed with two new political books hitting the bookstores at the moment:

It’s an election year, so get ready. Two astonishingly dullwitted books arrived in bookstores this week, on the same day, as their dreadful authors hit the airwaves to promote them. One was White Rage: The Threat to American Democracy, about the breathtaking stupidity and backwardness of rural whites, who are destroying America. Taking care to be subtle, the publisher gave the book a cover that features a pick-up truck with an American flag and a Trump sign, leaving out only the weird kid with the banjo and the dude who shouts, “Squeal, boy! Squeal like a pig!”

And then there’s the wonderfully nuanced title Attack from Within: How Disinformation is Sabotaging America, by Obama-era US Attorney Barbara McQuade, who is now a law school professor after being asked to resign by Orange Hitler — though apparently a law school professor who is unfamiliar with the text of the 6th Amendment, thinking it exists to confer a right upon the public to have people put on trial right away.

[…]

The cover of McQuade’s book is somehow more obnoxious than the cover of White Rage:

See, it’s a giant clenched fist rising out of Middle America. Get it? Get it? It may take a moment.

These books: If, one day, by some bizarre chain of weird accidents, these are the only remnants of our civilization, no one will have the slightest idea what actually happened while we were alive. They’re miscategorized fiction. Every paragraph is full of obtuse faked reality; if you hold it up to the real world, it doesn’t even sort of match. Go click on the Amazon preview for McQuade’s book, if you’d like to see this for yourself […]

Onward: “Much of the American right glamorizes assault weapons, based on the absurd claim that the Second Amendment protects not only the right to bear arms but also the right to overthrow our government.”

My goodness, where would anyone get the claim that a founding-era American document meant to describe citizens as having a right to overthrow their government?

The Declaration of Independence, the literal founding statement of the nation that gave McQuade a government job:

    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. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government … But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.

Thomas Jefferson thought Americans had a right to “throw off” their government; Barbara McQuade finds it an “absurd claim”. Which one do you think understood the topic?

Brian Mulroney, RIP

Filed under: Cancon, Government, History — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

In a guest post at Paul Wells’ Substack, Ian Brodie describes former Prime Minister Brian Mulroney’s role in ending the Cold War:

Prime Minister Brian Mulroney, Mila Mulroney, Nancy Reagan, and President Ronald Reagan at the “Shamrock Summit”, 18 March, 1985.
Photo from the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library via Wikimedia Commons.

Mulroney’s role has long been poo-poohed by intellectuals on the Canadian left. He was said to have an unhealthy obsession with pleasing the Americans. As a young boy, his fine voice won him an opportunity to entertain visiting American executives with a song. Amateur psychologists diagnosed a disturbing link between Mulroney’s having grown up in a company town, under the shadow of a US owned mill, and his reinvigoration of St. Laurent’s post-war grand strategy.

Mulroney never automatically fell in with US positions on the global issues of the day. His opposition to the apartheid regime in South Africa ran counter to the positions of both Reagan and Thatcher. But he drove the effort to link the American and Canadian economies through the free trade agreement. He backed our allies in the strategic competition with the Soviet bloc. And in helping to create the International Democratic Union, he helped put the west’s centre-right parties on the side of international political cooperation on the side of democracy, liberty, and the rule of law. The contrast with an earlier prime minister who could not bring himself to condemn the declaration of martial law in Poland a few years earlier was clear.

His personal relationships with a generation of American leaders gave substance to the transactional successes. As the Soviet Union came apart, he secured a spot for Canada as the first NATO country to recognize Ukraine’s independence and bolstered the independence movements of the Baltic republics. When Iraq tried to establish a precedent that, following the Cold War, large, powerful countries could invade their neighbours with impunity, Mulroney backed the US led coalition to liberate Kuwait with all the diplomatic and military power he had on hand.

And along the way, he so closely befriended both Reagan and the first Bush that he was given a privileged platform at two US state funerals, an honour never extended to a Canadian leader before and unlikely to be extended to one again soon.

Mulroney deserves to be remembered along with St. Laurent as Canada’s grand strategist of the 20th century. A trusted confidant of world leaders.

Crossing the Irrawaddy

Filed under: Britain, History, India, Japan, Military, WW2 — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Dr. Robert Lyman is on a visit to the site of a very significant event in the battle for Burma in 1945:

On 13-14 February 1945, 79-years ago this month the 7th Indian Division commanded by Major General Geoffrey Evans secured crossings over the Irrawaddy at Pakkoku and Nyaung-U/Bagan. The northern crossing (Pakkoku) was designed to allow Punch Cowan’s 17th Indian Division, and the Sherman tanks of 255 Indian Tank Brigade, to race across country to seize Meiktila. The southern ones, at Nyaung-U and Bagan (a few miles to the south still), were designed to prevent the enemy from interfering with the operations against Meiktila, and to make him believe that securing the Irrawaddy as a route to Rangoon — and not Meiktila — was Slim’s primary objective. In 2005, for the 60th anniversary of the Irrawaddy crossings, I was privileged to walk the battlefield with three veterans of these crossings, John Chiles (Probyn’s Horse), Manny Curtis (South Lancashire Regiment) and Bert Wilkins (RA, in support of the South Lancs). During that trip we travelled along the Irrawaddy from Bagan, anxiously scouring the maps in the South Lancs’ War Diary searching for B4 beach, where on the early morning of 14 February 1945 two hundred men of 2nd Battalion South Lancashire Regiment had rowed silently across the river to form the vanguard of the 7th Indian Division beachhead. I remember vividly the excitement as we found B4 — it was much easier than I had thought — disembarked from the boat and climbed to the top of the cliffs to find old trenches from the battle. It was an emotional event for the veterans as they recalled the battle and found trenches left by the defenders decades before.

At Nyaung-U the first wave of a company of the 2nd Bn South Lancs (including Manny Curtis) managed to seize the high ground above B4 in the early morning of 14 February. It was the longest opposed river crossing in any theatre of the Second World War. The beaches had been recced by a Sea Reconnaissance Unit and a Special Boat Section. However, subsequent waves of troops from the remainder of the South Lancs, the 4th Battalion 14th Punjab Regiment and the 4th Battalion 1st Gurkha Rifles were mauled by enemy machine gun fire as the leaky canvas boats and temperamental outboard motors failed to cope with the distance they had to cover and the strength of the river’s flow. The enemy? Pagan and Nyaungu were defended not by the Japanese but by three battalions of the Indian National Army’s 4th Guerrilla Regiment, some 2,000 men in well-sited positions overlooking the Irrawaddy. This was the only major engagement of the war when troops of the Indian Army fought in direct combat against the INA. To subdue the enemy positions causing casualties on the water, Sherman tanks of the Gordon Highlanders sniped the enemy positions, and an artillery bombardment by 25-pdrs and a Hurribomber strike pummelled the east bank of the river. Together these actions succeeded in forcing the INA to surrender. Further to the west, at Pagan, the INA’s 9th Battalion took a heavy toll of the assaulting 1/11th Sikh Regiment, before they withdrew to Mount Popa to the rear. River crossing are dangerous, especially for troops with little training in boatmanship, across one of the world’s greatest rivers. But this time the 7th Indian Division succeeded with little training or preparation. By the end of the day the east bank was in its hands. Amazingly, a cinematographic unit were available to film some of the crossings at Nyaung-U. An 8-minute reel of the landings can be seen in the IWM on JFU35.

Today I was able to revisit B4. Not much had changed in nearly 20-years. The size of the Irrawaddy even in the dry season is astonishing, the task given to the men of 33 Brigade enormous. In 2005 we climbed the cliffs that Manny and his friends had raced up in 1945. Looking at them again today, I realised just how Gallipoli-like was the terrain. In the hands of of better trained enemy, 33 Brigade should never have managed to get off the beachhead. Rippling rows of gullies flow behind the initial landing site: if these had all been defended, a position of great depth and near impregnability could have been achieved. These photos look down on B4 and across to the position up which the men of 2nd South Lancs scrambled.

The Hindenburg Disaster – Dining on the Zeppelin

Filed under: Food, Germany, History, Technology — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Tasting History with Max Miller
Published Nov 28, 2023

Decadent vanilla rice pudding with poached pears, chocolate sauce, and candied fruit

City/Region: France
Time Period: 1903

Everything about this dish exudes fanciness, and it comes as no surprise. A ride across the Atlantic on the Hindenburg cost around $9,000 in today’s money, and the whole experience was meant to be luxurious. The head chef on the Hindenburg, Xaver Maier, had worked at the Ritz Hotel in Paris, which was still cooking from the recipes of Auguste Escoffier.

The Escoffier recipe for pears condé seems simple enough, until you realize he references about 5 other recipes in total in order to make the dish. It’s a lot of work, but it’s so good. The rice pudding has such an intense vanilla flavor that really elevates it and is the perfect base for the poached pears. Don’t get too much of the rich chocolate sauce or it will overwhelm the other flavors.

Really you could make just the rice pudding and have that be a fancy dessert all on its own if you don’t want to go to all the fuss.

    Poires Condé:
    Very small pears which are carefully peeled and shaped are most suitable for this preparation. Those of medium size should be cut in half. Cook them in vanilla-flavored syrup then proceed as for Abricots Condé, recipe 4510.
    Abricots Condé:
    On a round dish prepare a border of vanilla-flavored Prepared Rice for sweet dishes (recipe 4470)

    — Auguste Escoffier, 1903

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QotD: Early siege warfare

Filed under: History, Middle East, Military, Quotations, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Now the besieger’s side of the equation may seem like an odd place to start a primer on fortifications, but it actually makes a fair bit of sense, because the capabilities of a potential attacker is where most thinking about fortification begins. Siegecraft, both offensive and defensive, is a case of “antagonistic co-evolution“, a form of evolution through opposition where each side of the relationship evolves new features in response to the other: neither offensive siege techniques nor fortifications evolve in isolation but rather in response to each other.

In many ways the choice of where to begin following that process of evolution is arbitrary. We could in theory start anywhere from the very distant past or only very recently, but in this case I think it makes sense to begin with the early Near Eastern iron age because of the nature of our evidence. While it is clear that siege warfare must have been an important part of not only bronze age warfare but even pre-bronze age warfare, sources for the details of its practice in that era are sparse (in part because, as we’ll see, siege warfare was a sort of job done by lower status soldiers who often didn’t figure much into artwork focused on royal self-representation and legitimacy-building).

But as we move into the iron age, the dominant power that emerges in the Near East is the (Neo-)Assyrian Empire, the rulers of which make a point of foregrounding their siegecraft as part of a broader program of discouraging revolt by stressing the fearsome abilities of the Assyrian army (which in turn had much of its strength in its professional infantry). Consequently, we have some very useful artistic depictions of the Assyrian army doing siege work and at the same time some incomplete but still very useful information about the structure of the army itself. Moreover, it is just as the Assyrian Empire’s day is coming to a close (collapse in 609) that the surviving source base begins to grow markedly more robust (particularly, but not exclusively, in Greece), giving us dense descriptions of siege work (and even some manuals concerning it) in the following centuries, which we can in turn bring to the Assyrian evidence to better understand it. So this is a good place to start because it is the earliest point where we are really on firm ground in terms of understanding siegecraft in some detail. This does mean we are starting in medias res, with sophisticated states already using complex armies to assault fairly complex, sophisticated fortifications, which is worth keeping in mind.

That said, it should be noted that this is hardly beginning at the beginning. The earliest fortifications in most regions of the world were wooden and probably very simple (often just a palisade with perhaps an elevated watch-post), but by the late 8th century, well-defended sites (like walled cities) already sported sophisticated systems of stone walls and towers for defense. That caveat is in turn necessary because siegecraft didn’t evolve the same way everywhere: precisely because this is a system of antagonistic co-evolution it means that in places where either offensive or defensive methods (or technologies) took a different turn, one can end up with very different results down the line (something we’ll see especially with gunpowder).

Bret Devereaux, “Collections: Fortification, Part I: The Besieger’s Playbook”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2021-10-29.

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