Quotulatiousness

April 20, 2025

The formal end of the League of Nations, 18 April, 1946

Filed under: Europe, History — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Norman Stewart reposted the text of an article in the Louisville, Kentucky Courier-Journal of 19 April, 1946 to mark the demise of the League of Nations:

Building A of the Palace of Nations in Geneva, now an office of the United Nations.
Photo by Mourad Ben Abdallah via Wikimedia Commons.

League of Nations dies, willing its assets to U.N.

GENEVA (AP, April 18) – The League of Nations, created to preserve peace after a world cataclysm, expired tonight and willed to the United Nations its physical assets in the hope that the new organization might succeed where the League had failed.

It had lived 26 years.

Delegates from 34 nations, outnumbered by spectators in the galleries, witnessed the death of first major peace organization of the 20th century.

Quietly, the delegates answered “Yes” to a roll call on a motion providing that “with effect from the day following the close of the present session of the Assembly, the League of Nations shall cease to exist except for the sole purpose of the liquidation of its affairs”.

Last session ends

At 5:43 p.m., Carl J. Hambro of Norway, president of the Assembly, pounded his gavel and solemnly announced: “I declare the 21st and last session of the General Assembly of the League of Nations closed”.

Thus ended the life of the peace organization conceived largely by President Wilson, but never joined by the United States.

Its legal existence dated from the entry into force of the Treaty of Versailles on January 10, 1920.

The nostalgic formalities of terminating the League were interrupted only with a problem that is the heritage of the century’s second great peace effort – the United Nations.

Egyptian objects

Mahmoud Mohamed Aldarwiche, the Egyptian delegate, abstained from voting on a resolution that pointed out that present League members with mandated territories have declared they will continue to administer these countries as mandates until they are placed under trusteeship of the United Nations.

“It is the view of my government,” said Aldarwiche, “that mandates have terminated with the dissolution of the League of Nations, and that insofar as Palestine is concerned there should be no question of putting it under trusteeship.”

Egypt feels, he added, that Palestine has reached a stage “where it should no longer continue under mandate of trusteeship. Her development is not behind that of Syria, Lebanon, Iraq or Transjordan, who have won independence”.

Treaties turned over

Hambro told Aldarwiche the United Nations probably would discuss the matter in September.

One of the League’s final acts was to turn over to the United Nations thousands of treaty texts.

In physical assets the United Nations will inherit property valued at $11,700,000. These include the League palace, other real estate and the League’s stock of paper, furniture, typewriters and similar equipment.

The League confirmed Sean Lester of Ireland as secretary-general as from 1940 and Seymour Jacklin of South Africa as treasurer from 1944. They will continue to serve until the last of the League’s affairs are liquidated.

Did Britain Bomb The Wrong Targets in WW2? – Out of the Foxholes Live

Filed under: Britain, France, Germany, History, India, Japan, Military, WW2 — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

World War Two
Published 19 Apr 2025

Today Indy and Sparty answer questions on the French colonies, Pykrete and iceberg aircraft carriers Japan’s invasion of India, and they talk about Britain’s misguided strategic bombing strategy.
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The essence of (most) modern western governments

Filed under: Government, Media, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Chris Bray on the paradox of how many western governments manage the alchemy of being both omnipresent and yet absent simultaneously:

Adding to my last post about covering language that masks the massive expansion of government behind performative language about limiting government: The most Los Angeles thing I have ever seen happened behind the Yoshinoya Beef Bowl.

See the alley between the Yoshinoya and the pharmacy? As I drove by on Wilshire, two extremely alert LAPD officers on motorcycles were sitting at the edge of that parking lot, postures tight and poised for action, urgently scanning the street. It was like watching a gunfighter movie, in the scene when the camera closes in on the gunfighter’s eyes, watching his opponent for the draw. These dudes were ready. If you did 38 in the 30 MPH zone, then brother, you were dead-ass done, nailed up in the trophy case.

Also, no more than thirty feet away from them, a little gaggle of filthy human zombies was passing a glass pipe around the circle, throwing up clouds of smoke, at the top end of an alley wall-to-wall full of open drug use and not terribly subtle drug dealing (and probably the prostitution that pays for the drugs, but I didn’t wander into the alley to look). But California made the possession and use of heroin, meth, and cocaine a misdemeanor, and the DA at the time was very proud that he wouldn’t allow his office to file most misdemeanor cases, because misdemeanors are lifestyle crimes that punish people for being poor, or for being “individuals experiencing homelessness”. So that alley full of people Hunter Bidening all day out in the open weren’t doing anything that could lead to prosecution, but your expired registration tags would bring down an immediate police response in you happened to roll by them.

Grand Guignol human depravity and ruin: no big deal. Minor traffic offenses: front and center.

This is Blue Zone governance, full stop, the thing people describe as anarcho-tyranny. Common San Francisco business owner experience: Police don’t intervene in the constant vandalism and tagging that degrades business property, but the highly alert army of code enforcement officers fine business owners for failing to clean up the damage that the city hasn’t prevented.

I forget who recently suggested this on I-still-call-it-Twitter, but go to Yelp and read some reviews for gas stations in Oakland:

Using Paul’s Sharpening System | Paul Sellers

Filed under: Tools, Woodworking — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Paul Sellers
Published 13 Dec 2024

Want to make this system? Here’s how: • Making Paul’s Sharpening System | Pau…

I have been sharpening edge tools for sixty years and every single day of my life, and the fastest way to get the surgically sharp edge comes when you master freehand sharpening.

This video gets you started, and you will see how easy and quick it is to sharpen your edge tools once you take the first step, following this simple how-to.
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QotD: “Hate speech”

Filed under: Britain, Liberty, Media, Politics, Quotations — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

… they have convinced themselves that certain forms of speech are not free speech. That certain beliefs should not be afforded the liberty of expression. You hear it in their telling, baleful mantra that “Hate speech is not free speech”. And if “hate speech” is not free speech, but rather some kind of toxin, a pox on public life, then crushing it is not censorship. It is more like an act of public health: cleansing the public realm of diseased thoughts that are liable to harm certain groups. These people see themselves not as censors, but as public-health activists delousing the community of germs spread by evil men and women.

This is why they balk and protest when the words free speech are used against them. They detest the idea that they are enemies of liberty. But of course that is precisely what they are. Just consider that nonsensical chant “Hate speech is not free speech”. There are two profound moral problems with this idiotic tautology. The first is that, actually, even genuinely hateful speech, including racist gibberish and misogynistic blather, should be free speech. By its very definition freedom of speech should extend to all speech, even speech we detest. And secondly, “hate speech” has become a slippery, amorphous category that now covers not only foul old nonsense like Holocaust denial, but also trans-sceptical feminism, criticism of Islam, opposition to mass immigration, and so on. “Hate speech” really means thoughtcrime. It is an utterly ideological category used by the cultural and intellectual elites to demonise and censor ideas, beliefs and moral convictions they disapprove of. The war on “hate speech” is the new war on heresy, on free-thinking, on minority opinion, on challenging beliefs. It is blatant censorship.

The illiberal liberals’ conflation of genuine hatred with moral opinion, all of which then gets cynically collapsed under the name of “hate speech”, was beautifully captured in an exchange on the BBC’s Politics Live yesterday. Pushing back against the FSU’s Inaya Folarin Iman, Baroness Kennedy arrogantly predicted that the FSU would be embraced by “racists … people who hate homosexuals, who hate trans people, [and] people … who have hostile views towards Islam”. Hold on. One of these things is not like the others. What is wrong with having hostile views on Islam? Is hostility towards a powerful world religion now a form of “hate speech”? Yes, it is. Kennedy’s conflation of criticism of Islam with racism and homophobia perfectly encapsulated the way in which “hate speech” is now used to police not only genuinely hateful ideas, but also blasphemy against religious ideas. Even that key freedom human beings fought so hard for – the right to mock gods and prophets and religious ideology – is now threatened by the censorious ideology of “hate speech”.

Brendan O’Neill, “Why we must win the fight for free speech”, Spiked, 2020-02-26.

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