Real Time History
Published 16 May 2025In the early 19th century, the United States and Mexico share a massive cross-continental border, but US settlement in Mexico, expansionist ideals and religious differences put the young republics on a collision course. As tensions boil over into bloodshed, the tiny, inexperienced US army marches to a war which will forge the modern United States.
Chapters:
00:00 Texas Republic
05:06 Declaration of War
07:03 The US Army
09:26 British Muskets in the Mexican Army
16:19 The Mexican Army
18:24 The Battles of Palo Alto and Resaca de la Palma
21:38 California and New Mexico
25:11 US Volunteers
28:40 Battle of Monterrey
33:03 Expanding the War
36:59 The Pedregal Battles
40:18 Battles for Mexico City
43:42 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo
45:14 Legacy
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October 16, 2025
The Mexican-American War 1846-48
October 14, 2025
Carthaginian or Roman America?
On the social media site formerly known as Twitter:
Alaric The Barbarian @0xAlaric
There’s a handful of evidence for this. Most of it’s a little fringe or circumstantial, but it exists.
– 500s BC Carthaginian navigator Himilco described the Sargasso Sea; the original work is now lost but it was quoted in Ora Maritima a century later. If you can make it there and back, you know trade winds well enough to take Columbus’ route.
– There’s quite a lot of copper “missing” from the Great Lakes area, and there was more bronze in the Old World than could have possibly been supported by the known copper mining infrastructure there … despite 7,000-year-old copper mines in that region, the local natives didn’t seem to really use copper for much aside from odd pictographic disks.
– The Tecaxic-Calixtlahuaca head, discovered in 1933, was a bearded terracotta head made before European contact with modern-day Mexico. Its features and style don’t match local populations or material cultures, and it’s been dated to centuries prior. Roman experts ID it as 200s AD Roman art. Even the archaeological community isn’t sure what to make of this one; their best (non-)explanation is “it was a prank”.
– Numerous odd discoveries were made of Old World artifacts in the American West throughout the 19th century. Alleged Roman coins, weapons, tools, etc. Some of these were hoaxes; others have been lost to time; others seem almost covered up. The wildest example is Kincaid’s alleged 1909 discovery of an ancient Egyptian-style tunnel annex hidden in the walls of the Grand Canyon, full of artifacts; and, a similar alleged discovery around Death Valley. The former was reported to have been investigated (maybe covered up?) by the Smithsonian, though they deny this; the latter is on government land now.
– Various Old World artifacts seem to show New World goods or maps; there is a depiction of a pineapple at Pompeii, for example, and c. 350 BC Carthaginian coins show a map of the Mediterranean including the Americas to the west. Certain of Ptolemy’s odd geographic ideas are “corrected” (such as his earth-size estimate) by placing the Antilles as the Fortunate Isles. The Piri Reis Map, compiled in 1513 but surely copied from much older sources, shows a fairly accurate east coast of the Americas, as well as Antarctica. Diodorus Siculus may have even described the Americas as found by the Phoenicians, then kept secret …
– This of course predates Rome and Carthage, but a wide swathe of native cultures had extraordinarily similar oral histories of being visited by ethnically distinct people from the east who taught them aspects of civilization … “But that’s probably nothing, right?”
The field awaits its smoking gun, its Rosetta Stone. But I believe something is out there, just waiting for an enterprising follower of Schliemann to discover it. There’s *something* there.
And in response:
John Ringo SF Author @Jringo1508
The part that does it for me (that there was pre-Viking contact) is just studying the development of pottery and metallurgy in the Old World vs New.
Old World: Burnt bits of clay with markings on them. Poorly formed “pottery” charms. Better made pottery charms. Pottery dishes. Metal ore based glazes. Simple, low temperature, metals.
New World: POTTERY FULLY FORMED AND GOLD AND SILVER EXTRACTION BECAUSE NATIVE AMERICANS ARE AWESOME!
The Carthaginians had a process of going to less advanced areas, teaching them some simple “advanced” technologies that in some way helped out the Carthaginians then trading with them for “stuff”. They’d teach pottery or better pottery techniques so that they (the Carthaginians) didn’t have to load themselves down with empty pots to pick up “stuff”.
They’d then trade stuff like bronze daggers for gold, silver and spices.
So, it entirely makes sense (if you understand the currents) that a Carthaginian/Phoenician (they’re the same) trading/exploring fleet would make it across the Atlantic in one direction (probably in winter), set up a trading center somewhere and start trading wares. They’d leave a few behind to build up a store then sail back.
If they went over in winter and sailed back in summer, good chance they were wiped out by hurricanes.
It could have happened multiple times with a small group of colonists left behind. Their genes would disappear in the wash.
But going from zero to FULLY FORMED POTTERY has always been my reason to know that there was early contact.
September 18, 2025
Stop calling it “Turtle Island”
At Woke Watch Canada, Igor Stravinsky strenuously objects to calling North America “Turtle Island” and all the other woke shibboleths of the modern progressive cant:
As another school year rolls out, we can hope a more honest and realistic portrait of Canadian history will start to take shape in our schools. Students have been brainwashed into believing that Canada was a racist state bent on the extermination of Indigenous people, who were peaceful and wise, living in harmony with nature and each other. But reconciliation between Indigenous and non-Indigenous people is only possible if we base policy and action on the truth, not fairy tales, hearsay, anecdotes, or ideologies. We need facts, evidence, and reasoned debate. A good start would be for people to stop referring to North America as “Turtle Island”.
Calling it that is essentially to call the current geopolitical organization of the world invalid. If Canada, the United States, and other Western countries are in fact illegitimate, then that means national and international laws are also null and void. So, unless you are the direct descendent of an aboriginal person who was alive before first contact with Europeans, you are just a guest here — a second-class citizen at best. Non-Indigenous Canadians will simply never accept that. Nor should they.
In any case, “Turtle Island” is a nonsensical name on several levels. Firstly, North America is a continent, not an island. It is connected to South America by the Isthmus of Panama, which means it is not even surrounded by water. In any case an island is defined as a land mass surrounded by water that is part of a tectonic plate such as Greenland which is part of the North American Plate, thus is not a continent.
Then there is the fact that Indigenous North Americans were oblivious to the geography of the vast continent on which they lived. Like people everywhere in the distant past, they only knew the area they lived in, which could be substantial in the case of nomads, but was still a tiny fraction of North America’s 20+ million square kilometers. Of course, they knew nothing about the geography of the world with its 7 continents and 5 oceans.
Most importantly, the Turtle Island creation story is a myth believed by a particular cultural group. There is nothing wrong with believing in myths: I personally believe in the myth of human rights, as most Canadians do (pre-contact Indigenous people certainly did not). Myths are powerful: Our common belief in human rights has helped to make the Western world contain the safest and most prosperous societies ever. But when our institutions subscribe to myths not shared by the majority of Canadians, they are choosing to elevate one culture’s belief system above all others.
In the past, the Christian religion was regarded as the one true religion in Canada by most people, and the spiritual beliefs of Indigenous people were often denigrated as primitive superstition. But elevating Indigenous spirituality in our secularized 21st century world by treating it as a knowledge acquisition system equivalent to (or superior to) the scientific method is an attempt to correct for that past ethnocentrism. This is Critical Theory in action: It always strives to alleviate past wrongs with present wrongs, a formula for social disaster if ever there was one.
September 15, 2025
The Cold War in Latin America Begins: Coups, Communists, and Castro – W2W 44
TimeGhost History
Published 14 Sept 2025Spy rings, covert operations, coups, street violence, and sudden regime changes. This is the turmoil that awaits Latin America after the Second World War. As new ideas from the East gain momentum, the United States tries to hold on to its role as the region’s self-appointed guardian. Which side will ultimately shape the future of this rich and populous region?
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July 23, 2025
Javier Milei is delivering “a man-made miracle” for Argentina
Niall Ferguson‘s thread on the social media site formerly known as Twitter, thanks to the Thread Reader App:
While the world fixates on Donald Trump’s populist cocktail of reciprocal tariffs and big, beautiful deficits, @JMilei is delivering a man-made miracle that should gladden the heart of every classical economist and quicken the pulse of all political libertarians.
@JMilei has brought monthly inflation down from 13% to 2%. The economy is now growing at an annual rate of 7%. Investors no longer shun Argentine bonds and stocks — indeed, they were among the best investments you could have made over the past two years. After a brief upward jump, the poverty rate has fallen from 42%, when Milei was elected, to 31%
These are astonishing feats. And they have ramifications that go far beyond South America. Free-market economics and political libertarianism are sometimes dismissed as a fad of the “neoliberal” 1980s, long ago superseded by the new populisms of the left and the right. Not so. The world has never seen a government more radically libertarian than @JMilei. But the amazing thing is not that it is working economically. The true miracle is that Milei’s shock therapy is working politically.
With his leather jacket and late ’60s mop top, @JMilei is part–rock star, part–mad professor, dancing, singing, and screaming his catch phrase: ¡Viva la libertad, carajo! — “Long live liberty, damn it!” It’s as if Joe Cocker had gone onstage at Woodstock and sung “I’ll Get By with a Little Help from My Friedman”. Never in the history of democracy has a tribune of the people won power this way.
July 21, 2025
Was Juan Perón a Fascist? The Cold War Origins of Peronism – W2W 037
TimeGhost History
Published 20 Jul 2025Was Juan Perón really a fascist, a socialist, or something entirely different? In this episode of War 2 War, we explore the rise of Peronism in post–World War II Argentina and how Perón tried to position his country between the superpowers of the Cold War.
Through labour reforms, nationalist rhetoric, media control, and brutal repression of dissent, Juan and Eva Perón created a powerful populist regime that borrowed ideas from both fascism and socialism, while claiming to reject both. From Argentina’s “Third Way” to its complicated ties with the US, USSR, and even Nazi fugitives, we examine the ideology, contradictions, and legacy of Peronist rule.
Was Peronism a unique form of authoritarian populism, or just another face of fascism?
Join us as we uncover the foundations of Argentina’s Cold War identity and the true political nature of Juan Perón.
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July 18, 2025
Argentina’s self-described anarcho-capitalist president
J.D. Tuccille says that Argentinian President Javier Milei may be the politician who has most successfully “defied the expectations of the chattering class” by not only winning the presidency but also by the completely unexpected turnaround of the national economy:
Drawing on official data, Reuters reports that Argentina’s “economic activity rose 7.7 per cent in April compared with the same month last year”. That was higher than expected and a welcome addition to news that the economy had grown by 5.8 per cent during the full first quarter relative to the same quarter the previous year. Early numbers put Argentina’s second-quarter growth at 7.6 per cent. By contrast, Canada’s economy grew at an annual 2.2 percent in the first quarter and the U.S. economy shrank a bit.
In equally encouraging news, Argentina’s “monthly inflation rate has fallen below two per cent for the first time in five years,” according to the Financial Times. That’s still high in North American terms, but Argentina’s governments have a history of wildly expanding the money supply to pay off debt and finance expenditures, resulting in inflation rates in the hundreds and even thousands per cent per year. Inflation slowed somewhat in recent years, but it was over 200 per cent in 2023 and Milei was elected on a promise to stabilize prices — even if it meant adopting the U.S. dollar as the country’s official currency.
Importantly, the poverty rate in Argentina has also fallen to 38.1 per cent of the population at the end of 2024 from 41.7 per cent when Milei took office. Again, that remains very high, but it’s an improvement in a country where politicians have long seemed committed to keeping people poor and dependent on the state.
This wasn’t supposed to happen. In a November 2023 open letter, over 100 economists warned that Milei’s economic “proposals, rooted in the economy of laissez-faire and which include controversial ideas such as dollarization and significant reductions in public spending, are fraught with risks that make them potentially very harmful to the Argentine economy and people”.
The economists — including such academic luminaries as Thomas Piketty and Jayati Ghosh — warned of havoc if Milei implemented his free-market plans. Voters weren’t impressed by the forecast of doom; they chose the self-described “anarcho-capitalist” economist and his upstart political coalition over the standard-bearer of the dominant Justicialist Party.
The Justicialists have been the strongest force in Argentine politics since their launch in the 1940s by Juan Peron. Peron served as a military observer in Europe and apparently combined the worst ideas he encountered into a peculiarly Argentine ideology he called “justicialism”, better known as Peronism. At its heart, the ideology drops the pretense of any practical difference between socialism and fascism and promotes a brutal mélange of statist economic schemes. This means that, while most property and business activity is in private hands, it’s subject to government dictates, distortions, and control.
HMS Canada / Almirante Latorre – Guide 389
Drachinifel
Published 25 May 2024HMS Canada / Almirante Latorre, a single dreadnought battleship of the British Royal Navy and Chilean Navy, is today’s subject.
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July 12, 2025
Noah Smith on how surprisingly well free market policies are working in Argentina
In the headline, you should read the unstated “surprising to far too many mainstream economists and political commentators”, but full credit to Noah Smith for admitting that Milei’s radical agenda has started to make life much better for ordinary Argentinians:
Javier Milei at CPAC in National Harbor, Maryland 20 February, 2025.
Photo by Gage Skidmore via Wikimedia Commons.
So to be clear, when I say that criticism of free markets has been overdone, I’m partly talking to myself. A couple of months ago, horrified by Trump’s tariff policies, I wrote an apology to libertarians, admitting that I had failed to see the political usefulness of their project in terms of maintaining economic sanity on the Right.
But it’s not just the political benefits of free markets that have been undersold; I think the purely economic advantages are also too often ignored.
Exhibit A is Javier Milei’s track record in Argentina. A year and a half ago, when Milei was elected President of Argentina, a bunch of left-wing economists warned darkly that his radical free-market program would lead to economic devastation:
The election of the radical rightwing economist Javier Milei as president of Argentina would probably inflict further economic “devastation” and social chaos on the South American country, a group of more than 100 leading economists has warned … [S]ignatories include influential economists such as France’s Thomas Piketty, India’s Jayati Ghosh, the Serbian-American Branko Milanović and Colombia’s former finance minister José Antonio Ocampo …
The letter said Milei’s proposals – while presented as “a radical departure from traditional economic thinking” – were actually “rooted in laissez-faire economics” and “fraught with risks that make them potentially very harmful for the Argentine economy and the Argentine people” … [T]he economists warned that “a major reduction in government spending would increase already high levels of poverty and inequality, and could result in significantly increased social tensions and conflict.”
“Javier Milei’s dollarization and fiscal austerity proposals overlook the complexities of modern economies, ignore lessons from historical crises, and open the door for accentuating already severe inequalities,” they wrote.
Milei won anyway. His first big policy, and the one the lefty economists fretted about the most, was deep fiscal austerity. Argentina’s long-standing economic model, created by dictator Juan Peron in the 1950s, involved a large and complex array of public works projects and subsidies for various consumer goods like energy and transportation. Milei slashed many of these, as well as cutting pensions, civil service employment, and transfers to provinces. Overall, he cut public spending by about 31%, resulting in a near-total elimination of Argentina’s chronic budget deficit:
The point of all this cutting wasn’t just to remove state intervention in the economy — it was to stop inflation. Basically, macroeconomic theory says that if deficits are high and persistent enough, then they convince everyone that the government will eventually inflate its debt away by printing money (which becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy). And most or all countries that experience hyperinflation end up escaping it only when they get their fiscal house in order. Perpetual deficits were part of Argentina’s “Peronist” system, and it’s probably a good bet that this has been responsible for the periodic bouts of hyperinflation that it experiences.
[…]
But still, Milei’s success so far should make us somewhat more confident about free-market policies — especially when we evaluate them against the new socialist ideas that have been gaining currency in the U.S. In the past, socialists and other left-leaning economic thinkers advocated central planning and nationalization of industry; in recent years, they have taken to calling for expansion of the state through fiscal policy, mixing macroeconomic justifications with micro. At all times, they call for deficit-financed expansion of social programs; when fiscal hawks want to tame the deficits, the lefties warn of the short-term macroeconomic harms of austerity.
If you’re always more terrified of austerity than you are of deficits, expansion of the state — and of the deficit — becomes a one-way ratchet. This approach is very different than Keynesianism, which advocates stimulus to overcome recessions, followed by austerity during boom times. You’ll recognize it as bearing a distinct similarity to MMT; that pseudo-theory has largely fallen out of favor, but there are plenty of more respectable progressive types whose ideas nonetheless have a lot of this “macroleftist” flavor.
July 9, 2025
Argentina after 18 months of Milei’s leadership
All the mainstream media folks were predicting that Argentina would be an utter economic disaster after the election of Javier Milei. A few of them are starting to come around to admitting that Argentina seems to have made the right move:
What’s happening in Argentina is super impressive, but it’s not a miracle.
Yes, Milei’s reforms are generating great results, but that is exactly what libertarians and small-government conservatives said would happen.
Let’s start with this celebration of the amazing growth of private-sector wages since Milei took office in late 2023.
Or how about the astounding way that Milei has conquered inflation (I also like how this tweet mocks the statists like Piketty who frantically and erroneously warned that Milei’s election would produce an economic catastrophe).
[…]
Let’s close with another tweet.
Here’s Noah Smith, who is not a libertarian, shared two days ago.
Give him credit for acknowledging Milei’s success.
I’ll add two comments about this tweet, one about economic data and the other about predicting whether Milei would get great results.
Regarding data, I don’t think anyone should get overly excited by one month or one quarter of economic data. Even one year of data might create a misleading impression (which is why my Anti-Convergence Club is always based on decades of data). That being said, there is every reason to expect continuing strong results for Argentina.
Regarding predictions, Smith’s tweet asserts that libertarians didn’t expect Milei to be so wildly successful. At the risk of sounding like a politician, I agree and disagree.
- The “agree” part is that many libertarians were worried at the beginning of Milei’s presidency that he might face immovable opposition from the Peronist-controlled legislature. We also worried that the special interest groups might launch massive – and successful – protests that would derail necessary reforms. So if you asked me in December 2023 for my prediction, I would not have been overflowing with optimism.
- The “disagree” part is that I have always had total and absolute confidence that radical pro-market policies will produce great results, anywhere and everywhere. And I assume other libertarians (as well as Reagan-type conservatives) share my faith that good policies lead to good outcomes. So if I was told in December 2023 what Milei would have accomplished in his first 18 months, I would have fully expected the great news we now see.
In other words, what’s miraculous is that the reforms happened. The subsequent economic renaissance has been boringly inevitable (but totally wonderful).
P.S. I am cautiously optimistic that Milei will get more allies in the legislature after Argentina’s mid-term elections later this year.
June 30, 2025
Small Arms History of the Falkland Islands Defense Force
Forgotten Weapons
Published 12 Feb 2025Various militias existed on the Falkland Islands since its earliest settlement, but the Falkland Islands Defense Force of today traces its roots to the 1892 Falkland Islands Volunteer Corps. This force was equipped with Martini Henry rifles. With the outbreak of World War One, the Falklands were a strategically important naval station, and the FIDF grew significantly in size and was fitted out with more modern arms. They expanded again in World War Two, with Lee Enfield rifles, Sten MkV SMGs, and Bren, Lewis’s and Vickers machine guns. Eventually in 1972 the force modernized, acquiring British L1A1 SLR rifles, L2A3 Sterling SMGs, and GPMGs (FALs and FN MAGs) and updating its Bren guns to 7.62mm. These were the standard arms at hand during the Argentine invasion in 1982, although the FIDF was not really an active participant in the resistance to the invasion. In fact, the British Marine party on the island was in the middle of being replaced when the invasion happened and twice the normal number of Marines were present. They armed themselves with most of the FIDF SLRs, leaving the FIDF with mostly just SMLE rifles.
After the war, the FIDF was reconstituted. It kept its SLRs until the early 1990s when they were replaced with 5.56mm rifles. Instead of adopted the British L85A1, the FIDF opted to purchase Steyr AUGs. The intention was to replace the GPMG with the heavy-barreled AUG, but this did not work out in practice. Instead, the GPMGs remained in service and the heavy-barreled AUGs were converted to standard rifles. In the post-war years the FIDF also began to acquire more specialty arms, starting with a Parker-Hale M85, a couple of Steyr HS-50s, and ultimately a batch of LMT 7.62mm rifles. They remain a small but quite well-equipped for today, offering valuable reconnaissance and local knowledge to the British Army garrison should conflict break out again.
Many thanks to the FIDF for giving me access to their armory to dig out these arms to film for you!
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May 29, 2025
Q&A: The Falklands War of 1982
Forgotten Weapons
Published 3 Jan 2025Since I spent a couple weeks hiking across the Falklands and then visiting battlefields (and penguins), it seems reasonable to do a Q&A video about the place and the 1982 war there between Argentina and the UK. All the questions were provided by Forgotten Weapons Patrons.
01:38 – How did the FAL perform, seeing as both sides used it?
03:43 – Effectiveness of light and heavy weapons in the war
08:49 – Would the British have been better off Yomping with AR15s, like the SAS used?
10:09 – Is there much local animosity to Argentina today?
12:21 – Local food and adult beverages
15:31 – What do people do for fun on the Falklands?
17:52 – Oldest small arm in service during the war?
20:18 – Military equipment wreckage on the islands
22:06 – Value of full powered rifle round in the FI terrain?
24:31 – Minefields
25:44 – Interaction of weapons with different effective ranges
28:46 – Did Exocet spur development of CIWS?
31:00 – What has been done to defend the islands against another invasion?
33:51 – Issues with an army designed to fight the USSR in Europe deploying to the South Atlantic?
35:30 – Weirdest weapon used in the conflict?
36:29 – Field modifications of small arms and unique kit
38:20 – Were British vehicle at risk of damage there?
39:40 – Engagement ranges
40:23 – Relevancy of bayonet fighting
41:28 – Unique equipment used by the Falkland Islands Defense Force
43:27 – American view of the Falklands War today
44:41 – Which Yomp route did we take?
45:01 – Did we visit Ajax Bay or the cemetery?
46:00 – Reality vs my expectations of the islands
46:57 – How would the war go if it happened today instead of in 1982?
48:25 – Did British soldiers use Argentine FALs?
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May 9, 2025
They keep saying the quiet part out loud – democracy is a threat to the establishment
N.S. Lyons went to Barad-dûr Ottawa earlier this month to speak at the 2025 Civitas Canada Conference, and posted his remarks on his Substack:
The 2022 Freedom Convoy induced a state of panic in the Canadian federal government, yet the elected representatives proved completely unwilling to even talk to anyone from the protests. The government clearly persuaded itself that this was an actual insurrection, and waited for the violence to break out … and there was no violence, other than that provided by the police and a few paid actors.
A screenshot from a YouTube video showing the protest in front of Parliament in Ottawa on 30 January, 2022.
Photo via Wikimedia Commons.
Good evening ladies and gentlemen! It’s a pleasure to visit the North and get a glimpse behind the new Iron Curtain …
As it happens, the official theme of this conference is “Freedom and its Discontents: Liberal Democracy at a Crossroads”. That is a timely theme indeed. Because I think it isn’t too extreme to say that, all around the Western world today, democracy is under assault — even that it risks extinction. It risks extinction because the authorities that run our societies seem to find the practice, values, and very spirit of democracy to be increasingly intolerable.
In France, where the ruling government maintains power despite being the most widely hated in decades, the most popular candidate of the most popular political party has been barred from challenging that government in upcoming elections, on legal grounds that are openly political.
In Romania, when the “wrong” outsider candidate appeared poised to win an election, authorities simply canceled the election outright and then had him arrested, the unelected national security state inventing entirely unsupported excuses about foreign meddling to justify their coup d’état against the democratic process.
In Germany, the state has now begun the process of banning the country’s most popular party, supported by more than a quarter of the voting population, in order to avoid facing any real political opposition. “We did it in Romania, and we will obviously have to do it in Germany, if necessary”, is how a former European Commissioner confidently foreshadowed events on live television a few months ago.
One gets the sense that the honest view of our exasperated political elites is as captured in a Bloomberg News headline from last year which read: “2024 is a year of elections, and that’s a threat to democracy”.
In country after country, governments are moving to desperately tighten their grip over the people they rule, sharply curtailing freedom of speech and access to information, and using alleged threats to security and stability to justify granting themselves emergency powers, weaponizing the law, criminalizing dissent, and suppressing any meaningful political opposition.
In the United Kingdom, more than 12,000 people per year (that’s 33 per day on average) — are now arrested for speech- and literal thought-crimes, including silent prayer. UK jails now hold hundreds of political prisoners, more than anywhere else in Europe outside of Russia and Belarus. These are people persecuted for, essentially, voicing dissent over their government’s catastrophic policies. Recently, for instance, a British woman with no criminal history was jailed for more than two years for a single Facebook post criticizing the state’s willful failure to stop illegal migration.
In Brazil, a single Supreme Court judge, in alliance with the country’s leftist president, has effectively established a judicial dictatorship, locking up political rivals by decree, silencing the speech of opposition figures, and utilizing state leverage over the financial system to punish political enemies by banishing them from public economic life.
But of course Brazil’s authorities learned these tactics by observation. Observation of Canada, to be precise, where Justin Trudeau’s government first employed debanking — along with a little brute force — as a tool to crush peaceful protest of his draconian and disastrous pandemic lockdown policies.
Today, the Canadian government’s weaponization of the legal system and public institutions, including state-funded media, to impose a quasi-totalitarian progressive ideological regime, censor and jail dissenters, and effectively transform Canada into a one-party state, has, I’m afraid, won your country a real measure of global infamy. Many Canadians here may not be aware of just how your government appears from the outside, but I’m afraid it’s not a good look at all. Unfortunately I must report that when many of us look at Canada what we see is a global leader in progressive authoritarianism, out-of-control migration, growing anarcho-tyranny, foreign subversion, and ideologically-induced economic stagnation.
But then, what we might realistically call the liberal-authoritarian model is, sadly, the new normal in the West, where many hyphenated liberal-democracies seem to have concluded that they must now begin to cast off the democratic half of that historical compact.
It may seem that this hardening of control is a response to the rise of so-called populism, which has swept the Western world. Certainly many authoritarian measures have been justified, without any sense of irony, as necessary to defend “our democracy” (so-called) against the dissatisfaction of the actual demos. And it’s true that fear of populism — which is really fear of genuine democracy — does seem to consistently provoke a spiral of ham-fisted reactions by our increasingly authoritarian states. But the reality is that populism is itself a reaction, an organic immune response to the particularly unresponsive and anti-democratic new form of governance that has visibly overtaken the West in recent decades.
Steyr AUGs of the Falkland Islands Defense Force
Forgotten Weapons
Published 8 Jan 2025The Falkland Islands Defense Force is a small organization independent of the British military, run directly by the Falkland Islands government. When it decided to update its small arms form the L1A1 SLR (aka British FAL) in the early 1990s, the British assumed they would purchase the new L85A1 rifles. However, by that time the flaws in the L85 were pretty well known, and the Islanders exercised their independence and chose to adopt something different. After investigating a number of different options they chose to use the Steyr AUG. At this time the AUG was in service with a number of other nations including the Australians and New Zealanders, and Steyr offered good terms and good support for the FIDF.
The FIDF purchased about 160 AUG rifles in total, including a small number of carbines and heavy-barreled LMGs. The carbines were particularly useful in a maritime role, which was part of the FIDF mission at the time (fisheries patrol). The LMG version, fitted with an Elcan C79 4x optic, was intended to supplant the FN MAG as a support weapon, but was found unfit for that role. Instead, most of the LMGs were converted to standard rifles via simple barrel swap. In addition, the Elcan optics proved prone to breakage, and were eventually replaced with British SUSATs. Indeed, some of the standard AUGs had their factory scopes replaced with SUSATs as well.
The AUG remained the standard rifle for the FIDF until recently, when the service received L85A3 rifles from the British. The AUG was not configured to use the bullet-trap blank adapters that the British used, and the L85s were intended to allow better integrated training between the two forces. A formal replacement for the AUG has not yet been determined, as it remains a bit unclear what the British military will decide to do to replace the L85 in the coming years.
Many thanks to the FIDF for giving me access to their armory to dig out these rifles to film for you! They remain today a small but quite well-equipped all-volunteer force dedicated to maintaining the security of the Falkland Islands.
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May 1, 2025
Military Tactics In The Falklands
Pegasus Tests
Published 27 Dec 2024A discussion with Ian McCollum of Forgotten Weapons about Argentine and British tactics during the Falklands War.
#forgottenweapons
