“An Army marches on its stomach.” — Napoleon
As we take our own little march down memory lane, let me state up front that I can’t stomach applesauce, just can’t. I liked it as a kid but now it has less appeal than the prospect of being duct taped to a chair, face down, in prison. Yeah, I hate it.
This may seem unreasonable, but anyone who was in at the time, at least in the Army or Marines, and some portion thereof that actually went to the field a lot, will probably remember the Great Applesauce Blight of 1977 and 1978, which was the reason I can’t stand the crap.
The “Great Applesauce Blight?” you ask. Oh, yeah.
The story I got, after some years and some digging, goes like this: It seems that sometime in the late 1960s or early 1970s, a fruit company – the Monterey Fruit Company, so it was said – was going out of business. So the Monterey Fruit Company, if that’s who it really was, called the Department of Defense and said, “Boys, have we got a deal for you. Hundreds upon hundreds of tons of Grade A applesauce, and you can have it. All of it. Cheap.”
McNamara and his Whiz Kids – neither of them ever sufficiently to be damned, of course – were gone, but their spirits remained. Department of Defense, ever conscious of the value of a well-squeezed penny, bought that inventory of applesauce, and began to put it into the old style, canned, MCI; Meal, Combat, Individual, which is to say, “C-rations”.
C Rations of the day were entirely canned and composed of a main meal, for one meal, plus either a cake (or very rarely, canned bread) or fruit of some kind, usually a small tin of peanut butter or cheese of some kind of jam or jelly, and one or another type of B Unit, which would have some variant of crackers plus either candy or cocoa. Sometimes, as with the B-2 unit, the cheese was in those.
Now, perusing a case of 1978 C-rats, which would have been newer than those of the Great Applesauce Blight, but still broadly similar, one notes that there were twelve menus, twelve different main meals, and 12 different kinds of dessert, a sundry pack, plus variable candies, spreads, etc. Of that latter twelve, eight were fruit and four were cake of some kind. I seem to recall that, possibly for reasons of economy, the amount of fruit during the Great Applesauce Blight had gone up to usually ten cans out of twelve, some extra cheese or peanut butter seemed to be included with some, and the cakes went down to two, one of which was going to be Chocolate Nut Roll, essentially inedible, from the Nashville Bread Company and the other would be the even more thoroughly disgusting fruit cake. I don’t recall who made that, and that lack of memory may have been an automatic defense against a future charge of capital murder. None of the cakes except pound cake could be relied on to be edible, and pound cake was always rare.
Now picture this, you’re a soldier in the Panama Canal Zone, training – training hard – to fight for the Canal, living in the jungle maybe twenty-five or more days and nights a month, eating C-rats to the tune of sixty or seventy a month, and virtually every meal contains applesauce or something more innately disgusting. “No, none of that nice fruit cocktail or those ever so delectable pear slices for you, young man; Department of Defense, to save a few bucks, has determined that applesauce is good enough, three meals a day, for weeks on end.”
*****
Now we were already kind of thin, because no military feeding system can ever completely keep up with the caloric requirements for a soldier either continuously fighting or realistically training to fight. Normally, this isn’t a problem because he can pack it on in the mess hall. These were unusual circumstances, though, with an unusually high chance of fighting – or riot control, which is worse – over the Canal. So we’re pretty much living out there, in pretty much trackless jungle, with nothing like enough helicopters for regular hot rations from the mess. Besides that, the old 193rd Infantry Brigade, in the Panama Canal Zone, was unusual in that it made a very serious effort to train even the cooks to fight, which takes time, too. C’s are pretty much it.
Even so, thin and hungry or not, after a month or two we could not eat the applesauce. That was probably seven or eight hundred calories a days that just got tossed.
We began going from thin to frigging emaciated.
*****
When I think upon the Great Applesauce Blight, though, I do not think about hardship or hunger. No, I think – as we old farts are wont to – about happier aspects of it.
Now this is no shit:
There we were, the heavy mortar platoon of 4th Battalion, 10th Infantry, stuck on top of a non-descript hill somewhere southwest of Gamboa, Canal Zone.
PFC McBrayer had a birthday out there in the jungle. I think it was his nineteenth birthday. None of us had been able to do any shopping, so we were all just stuck for getting him a birthday present. “I’m not giving up my pet scorpion,” said Big Al, who in fact, had a pet scorpion for the mega-ant versus scorpion gladiatorial combats we used to stage. “I’d offer to give him some of my crotch rot,” said Art, “but I think he already has some of his own.” “Howler monkey?” “Who’s going to catch it? And those suckers are mean, too.” “How about a sloth? They’re easy to catch.” “If the Lord God didn’t see fit to give B’rer Sloth an asshole, I don’t see why we should add to his troubles by catching him and wrapping him as a present.” Finally someone, I don’t think it was me, might have been Sergeant Sais, said, “Gentlemen, there can be only one proper gift under the circumstances,” and then he held up a – you guessed it – can of applesauce.
So we stuck nineteen or twenty Canal Zone Matches in a Nashville Bread Company Chocolate Butt Roll, invited McBrayer over, torched off the matches, sang Happy Birthday, then presented him his can of applesauce.
He was touched; you could see that. As he dashed tears from his eyes while making his, “Gee, you guys are just all so special … you shouldn’t have,” speech, you could see the emotion radiating from his face. And then, all choked up, he turned to go and tossed that can off applesauce off the hill with a casual contempt I have never seen before or since. It was the sheer, distilled essence of everything we all felt about applesauce.
Tom Kratman, The social media site formerly known as Twitter, 2025-09-05.
December 7, 2025
QotD: The Great Applesauce Blight of 1977/78
November 14, 2025
This is in your house … and you’ve never noticed
Rex Krueger
Published 12 Nov 2025The Secret History of Wood – Rubber wood
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November 7, 2025
Milei – “If we don’t have [power], then the left will have it”
In Without Diminishment, Geoff Russ discusses Javier Milei’s recent podcast appearance and his demonstration that unlike a lot of theoretical libertarians, he understands the dynamics of political power:
There are many liberals, libertarians and anarcho-capitalists who are really useless because all they do is criticise, let’s say, those of us who want to lead the world toward the ideas of freedom. And what they don’t realise is that power is a zero-sum game, and if we don’t have it, then the left will have it. Therefore, if you level your harshest criticism at those in your own ranks, you end up being subservient.
Have truer words ever been spoken by an English-speaking politician?
Argentine President Javier Milei’s words on the Lex Fridman podcast were a blunt reminder of something that many conservatives, particularly those in Canada, have chosen to forget.
Politics is the pursuit of political power and the chance to use it before your opponents can. Debates can be won, superb essays published, and quotes recycled from deceased politicians. Without power, however, it all amounts to nothing more than a glorified brainstorming session.
The thoughtful ideas and proposals go to waste if they lie stagnant in perpetual bickering opposition.
On October 26, Milei won a resounding victory in the legislative elections. His party, Liberty Advances, gained forty-two seats and smashed the hard-left Peronists who have dominated Argentina’s politics for more than half a century.
Milei is a fanatical believer in libertarian ideas, and has never pretended to be a moderate or incrementalist. He famously brandishes a chainsaw to represent his willingness to destroy the broken socialist status quo of Argentina.
Javier Milei at CPAC in National Harbor, Maryland 20 February, 2025.
Photo by Gage Skidmore via Wikimedia Commons.The rise of Milei has been a cultural battle for the soul of the country, and he is not shy about it. Milei leads a fresh, winning anti-Peronist coalition of forgotten and angry Argentines who want permanent, radical change.
It may be tempting to view Milei’s success as a pure affirmation of the appeal of libertarian ideology, but he is hardly Argentina’s first advocate of economic freedom. He succeeds because he is the opposite of a polite, centre-right reformer. Milei unapologetically embraces his place as a culture warrior seeking to remake the nation.
One of his targets is the institutional decadence and incompetence of the Peronist political machine. By swearing to snuff it out, Milei swept through traditional Peronist strongholds, whose voters had never considered voting for the formerly toothless Argentine opposition.
In Reason, Peter Suderman considers some of the lessons North Americans can learn from Milei’s stunning election victory:
To understand why Democrats overperformed in this week’s elections, look to Argentina.
Last month, Argentinian president Javier Milei won an unexpectedly large electoral affirmation, as his party significantly outperformed expectations by more than doubling its congressional representation in what was widely seen as a referendum on his agenda.
Over the past two years, Milei, the world’s most libertarian national leader, has slashed spending, cut red tape, and made his top priority restoring economic order and prosperity to a country that has long been a socialist basket case. Critics warned that his policies would be destructive, destabilizing, and unpopular. But not only did he deliver the country’s first balanced budget in over a decade, he oversaw a radical decline in inflation — from 200 percent when he entered office down to 32 percent last month.
Despite warnings that the country would reject Milei’s brand of austerity, the country responded with a strong vindication of his policies. In a post-election analysis, The New York Times noted that Milei’s message was that only he offered a “path for a country that has undergone years of runaway inflation under high-spending populist governments”. The report pointed to Milei’s economic record to explain his party’s win: “Many Argentines had grown tired of prices swinging wildly from day to day and of a ruling class they considered to be corrupt and irresponsible”.
The same report said Milei’s outsized victory was “unexpected”. But perhaps it shouldn’t have been, because economic stability and low inflation are what voters the world over clearly want.
When voters swept President Donald Trump into office for the second time last fall, large majorities of his voters gave the economy poor marks and said their own family finances had worsened over the years. Under President Joe Biden, the American economy had been wracked by the biggest surge in inflation in forty years. American voters punished the party that was in power when that happened.
This was true all over the world. After the pandemic, inflation skyrocketed globally, and in election after election, voters rejected ruling parties.
Inflation and economic instability have long been political losers: Look at Ronald Reagan’s victory over Jimmy Carter in 1980, and his ensuing near-sweep of states in 1984 after taming a decade of out of control price hikes. The post-pandemic years have further reinforced this lesson.
Update: Undoctrination looks at Milei’s time in office so far.
Undoctrination
Published 6 Nov 2025Javier Milei just pulled off the impossible … again.
In Argentina”s 2025 “midterm” elections, Milei’s 4-year-old party, La Libertad Avanza, went from a tiny minority to the largest party in the lower house, ending socialist dominance in Congress. The election was widely viewed as a referendum on Milei’s shock therapy plan for Argentina. The results are in: Argentines want more freedom.
In this video we cover:
How Milei slashed inflation from 211% to 31.8% in just 2 years
The 34,000 government jobs cut, 10 agencies eliminated, and 672 deregulations that freed the economy during Milei’s first year in office
How the Buenos Aires rental market exploded after lifting controls
How Peronists lost their veto-proof majority — and what it means for the futureAnd we feature expert analysis from Marcos Falcone, Policy Analyst, Center for Global Liberal and Prosperity.
October 30, 2025
Javier Milei’s party does well in mid-term elections
J.D. Tuccille on the results of Argentina’s recent elections which returned significantly more of Javier Milei’s allies than pre-election polls predicted:
And things were going so well before 2am …
Argentina’s libertarian President Javier Milei won an important election victory on Sunday when his coalition, La Libertad Avanza (LLA), received a plurality of votes in the country’s legislative elections. With about half of the seats in the lower house up for grabs and a third of the Senate, LLA didn’t gain a majority, but it dramatically increased its share enough to block repeals of presidential decrees by lawmakers from other parties and to support presidential vetoes.
As Reason‘s César Báez commented, the results give Milei and his allies crucial time to continue needed free-market reforms and, hopefully, restore the fortunes of a country once held up as a model of prosperity, but which has been driven into poverty by decades of statist misrule.
In what it calls “a shocking electoral victory”, La Nacion reports that LLA pulled 40.66 percent of the vote. That’s well ahead of the opposition Peronists, who have long dominated the country and drew 31.7 percent of votes. Importantly, LLA won the populous province of Buenos Aires (home to 40 percent of voters), a Peronist stronghold where Milei’s allies were recently trounced in local elections.
From Wealth to Poverty Under Government Economic Meddling
This is good news for anybody who hopes for the advance of freedom, of course. But it’s especially encouraging for Argentines who, over the course of generations, have seen their country reduced from one of the wealthiest in the world to an impoverished basket case.
“At the end of the 19th century, economists agreed: Argentina, the ‘land of silver’, had a golden future ahead of it,” Deutsche Welle noted in 2020. “‘Rich like an Argentine’ was a common phrase at the time.”
The German broadcaster added, “in an unprecedented fall, Argentina went from ranking among the world’s top economies to one at the very bottom of the list. Today, economists simply roll their eyes at the fate of Argentina, which is now a developing country.”
The reason is simple enough: Argentines handed their political fates to a man named Juan Peron. In the 1930s, Peron served as a military observer in Europe, traveling to countries including Germany, Italy, and the Soviet Union. He was deeply impressed by some of the worst ideas to ever motivate a government and blended them into his own “justicialist” ideology. Through decades of political dominance, first Peron and then successor justicialists demonstrated that, in practice, there’s no real difference between fascism and socialism and that statist economics by any name are destructive.
To illustrate just how destructive Peron’s legacy has been, it’s worth pointing out that after Sunday’s election, The Wall Street Journal reported that Milei’s free-market, smaller-government policies “have restored some credibility to Latin America’s third-largest economy, but about one in three people still live in poverty”. One-third of the population living in poverty is horrifying, but what’s remarkable is that this is an improvement over what went before. At the end of the preceding Kirchner presidency, poverty stood at 41.7 percent and then briefly rose to 52.9 percent before falling to its current level.
In Spiked, Hugo Timms points out that the success of La Libertad Avanza is almost diametrically opposed to what most mainstream media reports were saying in the days leading up to the elections:
Argentine president Javier Milei has won a significant victory in Argentina’s midterm elections, held on Sunday. His libertarian party, La Libertad Avanza (Liberty Advances), claimed more than 40 per cent of the vote, effectively doubling its share of seats in the senate and lower house to 37 (out of 72) and 64 (out of 257) respectively.
The result came as a bitter shock to much of the mainstream Western press. Milei’s assault on established economic orthodoxies since his election in December 2023 led many “experts” to take it for granted that Milei’s party was in for a hiding.
In a primer for the election published last weekend, the Observer had already begun salivating over the prospect of Milei’s defeat. “Argentina is counting the cost of its turn to Javier Milei”, wrote economics editor Heather Stewart. Glum portraits of Nigel Farage and Donald Trump behind Milei loomed above the article. “Politicians around the world are closely watching what happens when populist economic prescriptions collide with reality”.
This was a comparatively soft take compared with what the Guardian published earlier in October. “Farage, Trump, Musk: your boy Javier Milei just took one hell of a beating. Why so quiet?”, blared the headline when Milei’s party was defeated in a provincial election in the capital Buenos Aires. The Guardian said Milei’s “hard right” administration was “melting away”, along with his “once-packed international throng of cheerleaders and wolf-whistlers”.
Unsurprisingly, the BBC struggled to get to grips with Milei’s victory on Sunday, even though its only job was to convey the results impartially. Apparently, the president made gains despite Argentina “hurtling towards an economic collapse”, it editorialised. It said the voter turnout of 68 per cent reflected “widespread apathy”. This might be lower than past midterm elections in Argentina, but it was still higher than turnouts at last year’s US presidential election (65 per cent) and the most recent UK General Election (60 per cent).
None of this should come as a shock. Since Milei’s rise to power in 2023, most of the commentariat has been eager to see him fail. His promises to radically cut public spending and deregulate key industries were seen in the eyes of many economic experts to only mean one thing: the dreaded return of Thatcherite “neoliberalism”, from which, they claim, Britain and America have never truly recovered.
The antipathy is mutual. In a speech to the World Economic Forum in January 2024, Milei famously referred to the world’s political classes as “parasites who live off the state”. That his speech was shared approvingly by Elon Musk on X confirmed, in the eyes of the Western establishment, Milei’s status as a dangerous insurrectionist.
October 16, 2025
The Mexican-American War 1846-48
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 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.
(more…)
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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