TimeGhost History
Published 15 Jun 2025From Tsarist Russia to Stalin and the Cold War, the Soviet secret police evolved through endless name changes — but their mission never wavered: repress, control, and terrify. Discover how these agencies — from the Okhrana to the Cheka, GPU, OGPU, NKVD, and eventually the KGB, shaped Soviet life with ruthless efficiency. Torture, purges, and mass surveillance weren’t just tactics; they were the system.
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June 16, 2025
The Machine of Terror: How the Soviet Secret Police Ruled – W2W 32
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Why Orwell’s choristers wouldn’t solve the CBC problem
Peter Stockland was looking for a George Orwell quote in the four-volume Essays, Journalism and Letters collection, but instead he found something that painfully briefly gave him hope on how to resolve the eternal CBC problem:
Orwell had been employed by the BBC for about nine months at the time. He writes of the Beeb’s “atmosphere (being) somewhere halfway between a girls’ school and a lunatic asylum (where) all we are doing is useless, or slightly worse than useless”. But that didn’t prevent him observing the following and writing it down for potential reference:
The only time one hears people singing in the BBC is in the early morning, between 6 and 8. That is the time when the charwomen are at work. A huge army of them arrives all at the same time. They sit in the reception hall waiting for their brooms to be issued to them and making as much noise as a parrot house, and then they have wonderful choruses, all singing together as they sweep the passages. The place has quite a different atmosphere at this time from what it has later in the day.
There’s no overt opining. No proselytizing. No being a loud mouthed schnook. No. Instead, there’s quiet observing. Passerby paying attention. After the fact drafting of an attempt at understanding. All of it brings us journalistically face to face with the vitality – the potential for beauty – of ordinary, practical work using the tools available. It stands in stark contrast to the “useless or slightly worse than useless” abstractionism going on among the great, the good, and the self-important in the BBC bureaucracy.
When I first read the diary entry, it stirred me with eureka-like enthusiasm. That’s it! That’s the solution! We can finally let go of the never-never-land fantasy of abolishing the CBC/Radio Canada. Parliament can instead issue an immediate edict for Mother Corp to hire a “huge army” of cleaning persons, issue them brooms, and unleash them to sing their hearts out. They would soon sweep away the journalistic detritus and parrot droppings in the Corpse’s downtown Toronto and Montreal buildings. A little bit of hallway husbandry married to some glorious working class song: That would fix the GD CBC.
Alas, I was quickly shaken by remembering: This is Canada. Bureaucratism is the irreversible necrosis of the national spirit.
Within months – weeks? – there would be a follow up Clean Canada Choristers Control Act. A federal agency with a $50 million annual starter budget would police against misinformation being sung by the cleaners. It would deploy a gender equitable intersectional analysis to prevent settler colonial bias affecting distribution of bass, tenor, alto and soprano voices. Above all, it would regulate the size and status of the brooms to prevent any unionized chorister feeling unsafe or excluded.
I exaggerate? Not so much. Consider this week’s confirmation that Prime Minister Mark Carney’s urgency to “fast track” projects deemed of “national interest” is about to spawn its own Major Federal Projects Office – a bureaucracy to reduce the bureaucracy of getting down to work and building Canadian things that Canadians need.
You might think some journalist somewhere might ask, like, you know, “Why can’t they just reduce the bureaucracy instead of, like, you know, creating another one with more bureaucrats? Kind of, you know, play DOGE Ball North: ‘You! Bureaucrats! You’ve been tagged! You’re out!!'”
But no. Remember, as I was obliged to, this is Canada. Those kinds of questions aren’t asked even by journalists who should be asking them because … those kinds of thoughts are no longer thunk here. (I don’t think they’re actually illegal. Yet.)
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History of Britain, III: Celtic Britain
Thersites the Historian
Published 21 Jan 2025Although most of our early information about the Celts comes from Greek and Roman writers whose experience was with Celtic tribes on the continent, we can glean some insights into the Celts of Britain. We also introduce the fact that Ireland eventually became the world’s greatest repository of Celtic cultural preservation.
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QotD: Evading the censor
This “vibe shift”, as Gen Z calls it, reminds me of my then three-year-old nephew’s weekly blasphemy tour of the local supermarket. Back then, corralled into carting the little critter around town, I’d fasten little Jack into a pushchair and head off. He’d say little to nothing between the front door and the edges of the high street.
As we crept closer, mischief would smear across his lips. He’d bide his time. “Now, Jack,” I’d plead. “Remember what your mother said …”
We’d land in the supermarket. Jack would survey the crowds. At the top of his lungs, he’d bellow: “Boobies! Boo-BEES! Ha-ha-ha-ha! Fat — FAT boobies!” With a visceral joy on his face, he’d fold over and repeat the lung-puncturing cycle, laughing himself into a pram-splayed stupor.
For the first time, Jack indulged the timeless power inherent in saying a few forbidden words and basking in the illicit result. Freud, for all of his faults, called this joy “evading the censor”. Of course, Jack hadn’t read much Freud by then. All he knew was that saying what he was forbidden to say was, in fact, uproariously funny.
No doubt, modern scolds would pen a 5,000-word buzzword soup condemning Jack’s internalised misogyny, his unconscious patriarchal programming or some such modern voodoo. They’d miss the point: saying what one is forbidden to say is — and always will be — funny.
Christopher Gage, “No Laughing Matter”, Oxford Sour, 2025-03-14.
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