Quotulatiousness

October 30, 2026

There are useful idiots and then there are extremely useful idiots

Filed under: Asia, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, Handre recounts the efforts of Noam Chomsky to minimize the atrocities happening in Cambodia because he strongly preferred to blame the west for all of the wrongs in the world:

Noam Chomsky, the “Father of modern linguistics”, looked at evidence of industrial-scale murder and decided the real problem was Western media bias.

By 1977, Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge had already killed roughly 1.7 million Cambodians through execution, forced starvation, and slave labor. Chomsky, writing with Edward Herman in “Distortions at Fourth Hand”, treated survivor testimony and refugee accounts as State Department fabrications, preferring the far lower body counts published in sympathetic leftist sources.

The intellectual gymnastics required to reach that conclusion were extraordinary. Chomsky dismissed Father Ponchaud’s firsthand reporting, questioned Francois Ponchaud’s credibility directly, and leaned on a 1977 State Department document to suggest deaths numbered in the thousands, not hundreds of thousands. He applied maximum skepticism to anti-communist sources and near-zero skepticism to anything that cut against American foreign policy narratives. The methodology was selective to the point of being fraudulent.

Chomsky was not a fringe figure typing in a basement. He held an MIT professorship and commanded enormous intellectual authority among Western leftists. When he cast doubt on Cambodian atrocity reports, journalists and academics listened. Real people died while influential intellectuals debated whether their deaths were sufficiently well-sourced.

Collectivist ideology requires enemies to function. When the Khmer Rouge built their agrarian utopia by emptying Phnom Penh at gunpoint and executing anyone wearing glasses, Chomsky’s instinct was to protect the ideological project by attacking the messengers. Ideology over corpses.

October 29, 2026

Retelling (distorting) Indian history for propaganda purposes

Filed under: Britain, History, India, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

On a recent visit to the Red Fort in Delhi [Wiki], one of the most historically significant structures surviving from Mughal times, Dr. Robert Lyman toured the museum and found that the decolonialist fanatics have taken over historical interpretation:

The entrance to the Red Fort Museum.
Photo by Amit Ranjan via Wikimedia Commons.

I popped into the museum at the Red Fort in Delhi today. I hadn’t been here since 2019, and I’d been told that the museum had been revamped. I was pleased, because the last time I’d been here it was tired. But what I encountered was both shocking and worrying. I am all for having a divergence of opinion on historical matters, and I am as conscious as anybody of the sensitivities that exist on the subject of 1857. Likewise, we all increasingly aware of the heavily-biased historical narratives forced on people in various parts of the world, and worry about them. I have been acutely aware of the “decolonisation” process in India in recent years. But I wasn’t expecting to find such flagrant nonsense being perpetrated in the holy-of-holies of Indian independence, the Red Fort, today.

But nonsense it was, displayed in bold, assertive strokes, designed to present a definitive account of the birth of modern India from the trauma of British colonialism.

The first was a warning that naughty British historians still pushed a line contrary to the truth known to all true Indians that the “war of independence” was a popular rebellion against rampant imperial oppression:

That this is chock full of contestable assertions should be obvious to all but a few unhinged Oxford academics (you know the ones I mean) and the Guardian.

There are three floors of this stuff. As one enters a fascinating definition of colonialism is presented:

I wonder what the Romans would have made of this silliness.

Likewise, I hesitate to describe the following as history, let alone an intelligent analysis of the economic impact of colonialism. When I first came across the subject at university in the 1980s it was presented as the Marxist view of history. It was vacuous and unintelligent at the time, and remains so today:

On the Christianity point, I’ve done my own count and have calculated that from a population of 200 million across the sub-continent at the time there were 120,000 Britons (including 40,000 troops) and of this number about 450 were ordained. It was going to take a long time to Christianise India on this basis …

October 28, 2026

The Korean War Week 123 – I Shall Go To Korea!- October 27, 1952

Filed under: China, History, Military, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

The Korean War by Indy Neidell
Published 27 Oct 2026

After months of the people of the United States wondering what he would do about Korea if elected President, Republican Presidential Candidate Dwight Eisenhower this week announces that he will go to Korea in person to observe the situation first hand to see how best to settle it. In the field, Operation Showdown continues, and the Battle of Jackson Heights begins.

00:00 Intro
00:28 Recap
00:55 FLAK Suppression
02:16 The Hook
03:52 Jackson Heights
08:32 Operation Showdown
11:47 I Shall Go To Korea
15:11 Summary
15:21 Conclusion
15:55 Call to Arms

October 22, 2026

QotD: The “numbers fallacy” in World War II

Filed under: Australia, Britain, China, Germany, History, Japan, Military, Russia, USA, WW2 — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Some historians, and many politicians, have simplified World War Two into a few stupid statements. “The war in the west was won on the Russian steppes” is one that springs to mind. They usually base such statements on traditional political incompetence — bad use of statistics. The truth is that numbers have rarely overthrown a technological edge (though the Americans under Custer and the British at Isandhlwana might have reservations on this), and World War Two is certainly not the best sample case to argue such a thing.

During the war the smaller campaigns tended to get less credit — though it is sometimes suspicious that numbers are valued in some circumstances, and area in others. The Mediterranean Front against the Axis was an extraordinarily long campaign over an extremely large area, yet many – particularly Americans who often fail to understand the Mediterranean’s importance to intercontinental strategy – discount its scale and significance. (A British general visiting the Soviets responded to toasts about the battles of Stalingrad and Moscow by offering a toast to El Alamein. The bemused Soviets asked how big the battle was, and then commented “we would call that a skirmish” – a point which emphasises the fact that the hundreds of Soviet divisions embraced by historians of the Eastern Front were rarely as big as a British brigade or American Regimental Combat Team. To get a real comparison western divisions should be compared to Soviet corps.)

Similarly the Burmese and New Guinea theatres are incredibly undervalued in their role against Japan. There were more Japanese divisions fighting longer and harder in either place than everywhere that American troops fought the Japanese put together. (The fact that in New Guinea it was Australians rather than Americans who did most of the successful fighting – the American troops first assigned disappointed their vainglorious Füaut;hrer MacArthur enormously at first – might have had an influence on this ranking.)

By contrast the Western Front against Germany in 1944 to 45 is overstated both in the area it covered, and in the number of troops involved (almost half the US troops listed for that campaign did not arrive until it was already almost over. A dozen divisions had barely landed in France before the Germans surrendered.) Which puts it in the same category as the Pacific campaign, which, if the allied troops are discounted – as they so often were by the Americans – rarely saw more than a couple of American divisions at a time engaged anywhere.

The confusion is added to by the enigma that remains China, which is simultaneously undervalued and overvalued. It is undervalued in that China and Manchuria occupied the attention of 80% of the Japanese army throughout the war. Which means that by the standards applied by some historians, China was the Soviet Union of the East, and deserves all the glory that was lavished on communist Russia by the trendy historians of the last generation. On the other hand it was overvalued, in that China achieved virtually nothing in the war against the Japanese apart from occupying large numbers of very low-grade garrison troops. In fact when the US Air Force in one of its fits of vainglory, attempted to bomb Japan into submission from bases in China: the Japanese garrison troops stirred themselves enough to sweep forward and conquer – without any trouble at all – the provinces being used as bases (Operation Ichi-Go).

Nigel Davies, “Oversimplification: The Numbers Fallacy in WWII”, rethinking history, 2009-03-08.

October 21, 2026

The Korean War Week 122 – One Showdown Ends, Another Begins- October 20, 1952

Filed under: China, History, Military, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

The Korean War by Indy Neidell
Published 20 Oct 2026

One fight comes to an end as another gets going- the ROK forces are victorious and drive the Chinese completely off of White Horse Hill, but Operation Showdown, a larger battle involving a whole hill complex, is indecisive as the week ends despite a lot of brutal fighting. Away from the battlefield the question still remains — will the peace talks resume or is diplomacy at a dead end?

00:00 Cold Call
00:58 Recap
01:13 White Horse Hill
04:47 Operation Showdown
08:46 1st Battalion
11:59 Pike’s Peak
14:24 Peace Talks End
16:25 Summary
16:36 Conclusion
17:50 A Call to Arms

October 20, 2026

Singapore’s unique approach to multiculturalism

Filed under: Asia, Books, Government, History, Law, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

In the third and final (?) part of Ed West‘s review of Lee Kuan Yew’s memoirs, he describes the multicultural issue in Singapore and how it was addressed to reduce racial tensions in the city state:

Singapore led the way in becoming the first truly multicultural democracy, but this entailed sacrifices. Because segregation was a major driver of inter-communal tension, so the new Housing and Development Board, as well as providing much needed homes, brought with it the revolutionary idea of neighbourhood quotas. This meant the vast majority of Singaporeans being allocated a flat, on which they had a 99-year lease, in purposefully desegregated housing blocks. The city would never again suffer from race riots.

Parliamentary seats were also reorganised to ensure that every constituency had a representative from each group. “Without this arrangement, the Chinese majority in all constituencies would most likely return Chinese candidates”, he wrote. Voters “preferred one who empathised with them, spoke the same dialect or language and was of the same race. All candidates who have campaigned know this only too well. It was going to be difficult if not impossible for a Malay or Indian candidate to win against a Chinese candidate.”

Lee had a hard-headed approach to multiculturalism, as only someone who was truly multicultural could. As one of the Straits Chinese elite, English was his “master language”, but he spoke Malay well, more like a peranakan — a local-born Chinese — rather than a totok, a recent Chinese immigrant. For his annual speech, which could take up to two hours, Lee would address the audience first in Malay, then Hokkien, and finally in English. Hokkien would later be replaced by Mandarin, even though “for many Chinese Singaporeans, dialect is the real mother tongue and Mandarin a stepmother tongue”.

Lee’s view of multiculturalism also directed his approach to the law. An early experience of defending rioters in 1951 during the “Jungle Girl” disturbances had left him sceptical of the jury system, and he had it abolished in 1969, except for murder trials. Lee saw juries as incompatible with a multi-racial society, but he also believed that many people were too irrational to make such a decision.

He wrote how “a Straits Times court reporter who had watched many jury trials gave evidence … that superstitious beliefs and a general reluctance to take responsibility for severe punishment, especially the death sentence, made Asian jurors most reluctant to convict. They preferred acquittal or conviction on a lesser charge. The reporter said he could predict that whenever a pregnant woman was a member of the jury there would be no conviction on a murder charge, for otherwise her child would be born cursed. After the bill was passed and jury trials were abolished, there were fewer miscarriages of justice arising from the vagaries of jury sentiments.”

Singapore’s tough approach to crime became world famous, and curiously this was partly inspired by his experiences of the Japanese occupation, after which “I did not accept the theory that a criminal is a victim of society”.

He wrote how “punishment then was so severe that even in 1944-1945, when many did not have enough to eat, there were no burglaries and people could leave their front doors unlocked, day or night. The deterrent was effective. The British used to have whipping with a cat-o’-nine-tails or rattan in Singapore. After the war, they abolished whipping but retained caning (with rattan). We found caning more effective than long prison terms and imposed it for crimes related to drugs, arms trafficking, rape, illegal entry into Singapore, and vandalising of public property.”

October 18, 2026

Singapore: The rise of Lee Kuan Yew

Filed under: Asia, Books, Britain, Economics, Government, History, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

At The Wrong Side of History, Ed West continues his review of Lee Kuan Yew’s autobiography, detailing the difficult period after the British withdrawal from overseas military commitments “East of Suez”, including the vast naval base in Singapore and the Royal Air Force’s Changi air base:

October 31, 1971, and the British are saying goodbye to their military base in Singapore, the city where the empire endured its greatest humiliation. Three years earlier, an increasingly straitened former imperial power had announced its immediate closure as part of their withdraw east of Suez. For the recently independent city-state, this was a disaster, and prime minister Lee Kuan Yew had done his best to postpone the big day. The city already suffered from high unemployment, and Britain’s military accounted for 20 per cent of Singapore’s GDP, providing 30,000 direct jobs and 40,000 in support.

Yet retreat was inevitable, and when the day came British forces were given a ceremonial send-off, Lee writes in his memoir, the withdrawal carried out with “good intentions, goodwill and good faith”. After 150 years in the Strait, the British were gone, handing over the airbase to the colony they created for the symbolic fee of one dollar.

Lee had cut his teeth in the independence movement, but the city-state could not survive without protection. As with many small countries which had depended on the British, Singapore now shifted its allegiances to its successor state, the United States of America.

The imperial retreat presented a huge financial headache for the former anti-colonial activist, but increasingly a more personal sense of unease. “I feared that slowly but inexorably British influence would decline”, he writes: “and American influence expand. For my generation born and bred in empire, it was not an easy change. I had to come to terms with American power without a British buffer. The British had enforced their will with a certain civility. The Americans were different, as I could see from the way they dealt with South Vietnamese leaders, and even with Thai and Filipino leaders who were not in as parlous a position as those in Saigon. America was a power on the ascendant, with bulging muscles and a habit of flexing them.”

Lee had built up a good relationship with both Harold Wilson and Edward Heath, and used this to delay the withdrawal for as long as possible. He had less luck in getting the British to help Singapore train their army, something they had done with Malaysia where the threat of communist insurgency necessitated it. Neither were most of the other newly independent states willing to help: Egypt’s Nasser recognised Singapore and sent good wishes, but ignored his requests for military aid. India’s prime minister Lal Bahadur Shastri also said no, so he turned to another small post-colonial nation surrounded by hostile neighbours. When a small group of Israelis arrived in November 1965, they had to keep their existence a secret to prevent unrest from the Malay minority. “To disguise their presence, we called them ‘Mexicans'”, he recalls: “They looked swarthy enough”.

The Chinese here traditionally shunned military service, “a historical legacy of the predatory habits of soldiers during the years of rebellions and warlords in China”. As trading people they looked down on the military as a career choices, and he quotes the Chinese saying “a good lad does not become a soldier, good steel does not become nails”.

Lee also had to negotiate the problem of “representation” which mars all multicultural societies. Under the British, the city had been policed by Malays, often recruited from Malaysia itself, as well as the more neutral Gurkhas. Now “we had to find some way to induct more Chinese and Indians into the police and armed forces to reflect their population mix”, otherwise they would not be accepted as legitimate. “We wanted the people to regard our soldiers as their protectors – a reversal from the days when army and police uniforms aroused fear and resentment as symbols of colonial coercion”.

Conscription, unpopular under the British, was reintroduced, and the authorities even set up military cadet corps in all secondary schools, although his colleague Goh Keng Swee reflected that “the Spartan approach to life does not come about naturally in a community that lives by buying and selling”. As with Israel, another small state formed by a market-dominant minority, they were forced to adapt their way of life to survive; yet rather than become the new Sparta, Singapore focussed on becoming the new Corinth, a commercial centre where great fortunes could be made. When the British finally withdrew, RAF Changi Air Base became Changi Airport, a transport hub which came to epitomise the city’s commercial success.

October 16, 2026

QotD: Niccolao Manucci as a “player character” in history

Filed under: Books, History, India, Quotations — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

… when you suddenly realize that Manucci, like the protagonist of a Gene Wolfe story, is not telling you all that he knows.

How do I know that? Well let’s return to the teenage Venetian, suddenly orphaned of his foster father: “I was left alone, sad and anxious, having nothing to console me, nor anywhere to turn in order to recover my things”. Then things go from bad to worse: two other Europeans show up and steal the rest of Manucci’s stuff and coerce him into traveling with them to Delhi. But then somehow the young man scores an interview with the king’s vizier and, using the bits of Persian he picked up along the journey, convinces him to arrest the men who’d tried to abduct him. He parlays the vizier’s friendship into a royal audience, and thence into an offer of employment from the crown prince. In a short while, Manucci is a courtier hanging around the palace in fine clothes paid for by the state, getting tutored in Indian languages and Mughal history and correct deportment. He tells us that the only difficulty in his life was the need to constantly scheme in order to avoid being forcibly converted to Islam, and then interrupts his own narration to give us a few hundred pages of ancient Mughal history.

Are you rolling your eyes yet? Every bit of this story so far, starting from the moment he snuck onto that ship, is literally unbelievable. Irvine certainly seemed to feel that way, if his footnotes and interjections are anything to go by. He evidently flung himself into a centuries-later posthumous cross-examination, looking for any detail in Manucci’s narrative that’s out of place. He doesn’t find any. Worse, he finds numerous corroborating accounts in other contemporaneous sources. But if this story actually happened, then we are left with a nasty trichotomy. One of three things must be true: (1) Manucci is the luckiest sonofabitch alive. (2) Manucci has superhuman powers of persuasion. (3) Manucci is leaving out something important. Actually, I’m pretty sure it’s a little bit of all three, because Manucci is a player character.

They walk among us. Lately the preferred jargon term has been “agency”. Before that people called them “live players”. In the old days they were referred to as “great men”, but that one’s my least favorite of the descriptors because it implies that they have to be like Cyrus the Great or Napoleon, when in reality they’re often much harder to spot. That’s because, as Samo Burja notes, player characters often deliberately cloak themselves in order to avoid detection by other player characters. These ones you may only notice by their aftereffects, like the lingering gravitational distortion after a singularity has whizzed by, reality warping as they knife through to their destination and then reconstituting itself behind them.

Humanity’s great sages have long known that every so often the planets are in a particular configuration, and a Child of Destiny is born. The real question is why. The fun-ruiners will note that in a world of billions of people, some of them are just going to be 6σ lucky. It is difficult for us even to conceive what it means to be 6σ lucky, and yet, like some bizarre object conjured by a non-constructive mathematical proof, we know such people are out there, somewhere in the wave function. But let’s not be fun-ruiners for a moment and consider the other possibilities. Maybe these individuals are chosen by God, or the gods. Or maybe they are the ones paying for the simulation, and therefore have access to the root login. Whatever their source, they exist. Often they spend part of their lives unaware of their true nature. And then … they awaken.

There was a little while when “NPC” was getting thrown around as a term of abuse, but as I have explained at some length,1 there’s nothing wrong with being an NPC. We come by it honestly. At some point, in the Springtime of your life, you bumped up against the universe, you pushed the boundaries, you pushed your limits. On that day, the universe pushed back. Hard. You learned your lesson, like a little kid who touched a hot stove. NPCs are formed from scar tissue, a fibrous mass of tough lessons about the nature of the world. But, as we have just deduced, there must exist people who, whether by divine ordinance or fluke of probability, had a very different experience on that fateful day. They pushed against the universe, and the universe gave in and gave them everything they wanted. And what lesson does that impart? Something like: “Rules are for the sheep, but you can hack the matrix and get what you want”. Now they are awakened. And the crazy thing is that if you keep getting lucky, not 6σ lucky, but just on-a-roll lucky, the awakened state can become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Some parts of the world really can be hacked with a little luck and a lot of determination. So there’s a feedback loop that can rapidly amplify mere one-in-a-billion luck into miraculous, reality-altering luck. That’s my attempt at a purely naturalistic explanation of player characters. Or maybe they’re just chosen by God.

Manucci is a slippery one. I only caught him because I read the first part of this book twice: once when I was reading it through casually, and then again as I sat down to write this review and tried to figure out how the hell to convey all this. Again, as with a Gene Wolfe novel, to understand the beginning you must have read the ending. In all the thousands of pages of narration, the one subject Manucci barely touches on is himself. That’s because Manucci is a player character practicing very high-level obfuscation techniques. This sort of misdirection is also the hallmark of a con-man, and what do you know: there is one brief, brief moment when Manucci gets a little too sure of himself and lets slip that he actually was functioning as a super-effective con-man back there in 17th century India. He wove his web of shadows around the Mughal aristocracy, and then he nearly got it around us the readers as well.

So we finally have Manucci pinned down: he is the subtype of player character known as a “guile hero“. You know them from stories: Odysseus, or Locke Lamora, or almost every character played by Kevin Spacey. Manucci is like them, his character class is either rogue or bard.2 At what age was he awakened? Was he already aware of his powers when he crept down that Venetian dock? And what really happened between him and Bellomont? Did he seduce the English gentleman? Or did he suss out his mission and blackmail him with a threat to make it public? Or did he just turn the full force of his personality on the hopeless cavalier and get 6σ lucky on his CHA roll? We shall never know. But if you are asking questions like these, then you now have the correct interpretive lens for what follows.3

John Psmith, “REVIEW: Storia do Mogor, by Niccolao Manucci”, Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf, 2025-09-08.

  1. Twice!
  2. This is a totally OP and broken build, since as a Venetian he already gets a racial bonus to DEX and CHA.
  3. And you’re one step ahead of Irvine, who as far as I can tell never figured it out.

October 14, 2026

The Korean War Week 121 – America Has Had Enough! – October 13, 1952

Filed under: China, History, Military, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

The Korean War by Indy Neidell
Published 13 Oct 2026

The UN delegation walks out of the Panmunjom Peace Talks this week, after the Communist side refuses all of their proposals to solve the POW repatriation issue. A major naval training exercise off the coast comes to its end, with disappointing results, and in the field the Battle of White Horse Hill, the deadliest battle so far this year, rages all week long.

00:34 Recap
00:57 Naval Training Exercise
04:31 Harrison Walks Out
06:41 White Horse Hill
13:47 Operation Showdown
14:34 Summary
14:50 Conclusion
16:39 Memorial

October 12, 2026

The Great Game for Asia 1894-1905

Filed under: Britain, China, Germany, History, Japan, Military, Russia, USA — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Real Time History
Published 15 May 2026

The 19th century is a time of violent global imperial competition. The Scramble for Africa and the Great Game between the Russian and British Empires over influence in Central Asia are among the best-known examples. But the 2nd half of the century also involved another Great Game – the Great Game for Asia.

00:00 Intro
05:35 1st Sino-Japanese War 1894-95
30:02 Boxer War 1900-01
55:40 Russo-Japanese War 1904-05
01:22:14 Conclusion
(more…)

October 8, 2026

Singapore’s journey from British colony to independent economic star

Filed under: Asia, Books, Britain, Economics, Government, History — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

At The Wrong Side of History, Ed West reviews the autobiography of Lee Kuan Yew, the first prime minister of an independent Singapore and the man most responsible for its amazing economic success:

There are few political memoirs as readable as Lee Kuan Yew’s From Third World to First, but then there were few politicians like him. Arguably the greatest statesman of the post-war era, Lee led Singapore out of a failed federation with Malaysia, turning a poor and precarious little nation into a dazzling success story, now twice as rich as Britain, its former colonial ruler.

While many things have been written about Lee, the most interesting are by the man himself, with his early years covered in The Singapore Story, published in 1998. The sequel mixes memoir, analysis on international affairs, his own personal philosophy and a how-to guide to statecraft. As he puts it: “There are books to teach you how to build a house, how to repair engineers, how to write a book. But I have not seen a book on how to build a nation out of a disparate collection of immigrants from China, British India, and the Dutch East Indies …” It’s safe to say that he’s cornered that particular market.

It is a strangely cinematic story, almost fit for Hollywood: a man battling to save his small nation against the odds, who must feel that all is lost but struggles on and ultimately wins. Singapore’s identity, unlike that of most young countries, was not forged on the battlefield with swords and guns, but by markets, driven by a determined belief in economic growth, social order and hard work. Only these goals would allow it to overcome its severe demographic challenges, and avoid the violent fate of many post-colonial societies. Defying what experts thought was the direction of history, it became the most successful, and significant, city-state since the Renaissance.

The situation to start with was desperate, and Lee can be seen crying in black and white video footage from August 1965, when he announces that his city has been kicked out of Malaysia, a rare case of a state achieving independence against its will. As he puts it: “Some countries are born independent. Some achieve independence. Singapore had independence thrust upon it.”

Singapore was poor and cursed by its combustible demography. Twice the size of the Isle of Wight — and roughly the same shape — it nestles at the bottom of the Malay peninsula and to its south, just an hour’s ferry ride, is the giant of Indonesia. Neither neighbour was friendly, and Indonesia’s declared regional policy of Konfrontasi – Confrontation – was not reassuring.

Under Stamford Raffles in 1819, the British had founded Singapore as a trading post out of a collection of villages inhabited by Malays and a long-established community of overseas Chinese. Its position at a choke point was crucial for control of the sea lanes between the Far East and Indian Ocean, and under British rule it flourished as an entrepôt. Free trade was its foundational belief, and its hands-off rulers allowed the Chinese in particular to express their entrepreneurial skills; as its economy grew, Chinese migration increased, and by the time of independence they constituted about three-quarters of the population, with Malays accounting for 15 per cent and Indians the remainder.

Born in 1923 as the eldest of five, Lee was something of a father figure to his three brothers and sister, their actual father being a somewhat irresponsible and distant figure, and he certainly exemplified Adler’s birth-order theory, becoming the conscientious elder sibling to an entire nation.

The great-grandson of Hakka-speaking immigrants, Lee came from the somewhat Anglicised Straits Chinese elite. Often British in their mindset, Lee describes himself as “the last Victorian” and this worldview would shape Singapore’s history. He attended the English-speaking Raffles College, where he met his future wife, Kwa Geok Choo, another lawyer and a formidable individual in her own right; the two often finished first and second in exams.

Lee would have gone on to great things in any case, but he happened to come of age in a notably turbulent period. If worldviews are indeed shaped by the events of an individual’s twentieth year, for the budding young law student it was the fall of Singapore in February 1942, the British Empire’s greatest defeat and humiliation. Lee noted at the time that, whatever happened next, this was the end of European rule.

October 7, 2026

The Korean War Week 120 – The Battle of White Horse Hill begins – October 6, 1952

Filed under: China, France, History, Military, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

The Korean War by Indy Neidell
Published 6 Oct 2026

The Chinese are busy this week; they open the floodgates of a reservoir and attack Arrowhead Hill, but it turns out these are diversions from their main attack, which begins the Battle of White Horse Hill. It does not at all begin well for the Chinese, although the ROK take pretty heavy casualties too. There are also plans afoot for a new UN offensive operation, and a naval exercise begins off the east coast.

00:00 Phone Call
00:50 Recap
01:21 Reinforcing ROK 9th Division
03:01 Diversions
07:02 Operation Showdown
08:47 Naval Exercise
10:38 Increasing the ROK
13:17 Commonwealth Division
15:43 Warsaw and Seattle
17:29 Summary
17:45 Conclusion

October 5, 2026

Communism and the DSA

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

The fortunes of America’s self-described socialists are clearly on the rise, as DSA-backed candidates gain more media attention and come closer to being elected to office. The DSA really could rename itself the DCA without much pushback, as communism has lost a lot of its massive historical baggage in the minds of average American voters.

Photo via Rob Henderson’s Newsletter

Communism is on the rise in America. More than that: It is being celebrated.

With the midterm elections just over one month away, at least eight congressional candidates with avowedly socialist perspectives are poised to take office, polling well ahead of their opponents in states from New York to Colorado.

Think there’s no connection between socialism and communism? Think again. Nearly half of the members of the Democratic Socialists of America‘s (DSA) leadership body identify as communists. As Stu Smith reported earlier this summer, “Members with Communist political tendencies now significantly shape the DSA’s leadership”. In their December 2025 newsletter, members of the DSA’s Red Star Caucus celebrated Mao Zedong’s 132nd birthday.

All of which raises some natural questions: Where is this revolutionary romance coming from? And as it steadily seeps into our leadership class, where will it lead?

The best guide to understanding these questions is a book published more than 50 years ago under a pseudonym — because the author feared what pro-Maoist intellectuals would do to him if they discovered who wrote it.

Simon Leys, whose real name was Pierre Ryckmans, was a Belgian-Australian scholar of Chinese art and literature. In 1974, he published Chinese Shadows, a record of the cultural and political destruction he saw in China in the years just after the Cultural Revolution. The book is full of eerily relevant observations. One of them, which I will get to, is the most haunting thing I’ve read about what political terror does to the human soul. And nearly all of them describe habits of mind that didn’t die with Mao. In fact, they are now alive in America.

First, some background. In The Cultural Revolution: A People’s History, 1962-1976, the historian Frank Dikötter explains how it began. Mao Zedong wanted to purge rivals at the top of the Communist Party. So he turned to radical students, giving them permission to denounce every authority except his own. Party officials egged on these young militants as they raided the homes of “class enemies” and turned them into social outcasts. What followed was violence, looting, the legitimization of hatred, and the denunciation of family, friends, neighbors, and coworkers.

When the resulting catastrophe became impossible to deny, Mao and the regime’s officials disavowed their own shock troops, claiming that an “extreme left” had been responsible for the atrocities.

Sound familiar? Americans witnessed a milder version of this in the summer of 2020. Rioting and looting that year caused between $1 billion and $2 billion in damages. As this transpired, prominent voices in politics and media minimized the destruction. And some leading officials quickly insisted that the destruction was not the work of their own residents. Minnesota governor Tim Walz, later the 2024 Democratic nominee for vice president, estimated that 80 percent of those causing damage came from out of state, while Minneapolis mayor Jacob Frey declared that “the people that are doing this are not Minneapolis residents”. Jail records showed the opposite.

If the scale is different, the pattern is the same: indulgence first, followed by disingenuous disavowal after the damage is done.

QotD: Socialism and the world wars

Filed under: China, Economics, Government, History, Quotations, Russia, WW1, WW2 — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

What gave socialism a shot was that the hypertrophic nationalism of the first half of the twentieth century plunged the world into not just one but two world wars. Without these catastrophes, it is inconceivable that so many devotees of Marx would have come to power in the seventy years after 1917. The world wars made the case for socialism in multiple ways. First, they seemed to confirm the destructive tendencies of “imperialism, the highest form of capitalism”, in Vladimir Lenin’s words. Second, they greatly expanded the role of the state, which became the principal purchaser of goods and services in most combatant countries, creating precisely the kind of state-controlled economy that socialist theory claimed would perform better than free markets. Third, the wars acted as a great leveler, imposing very high marginal rates of taxation, wage controls, and price controls in ways that tended to reduce wealth and income disparities. Fourth, in 1917 the German government financed the Bolshevik coup in Russia that brought Lenin to power.

The tragedy was that those who promised utopia generally delivered hell on earth. According to the estimates in the Black Book of Communism, the “grand total of victims of Communism was between 85 and 100 million” for the twentieth century as a whole. The lowest estimate for the total number of Soviet citizens who lost their lives as a direct result of Stalin’s policies was more than 20 million, a quarter of them in the years after World War II. Mao alone, as Frank Dikötter has shown, accounted for tens of millions: two million between 1949 and 1951, another three million by the end of the 1950s, a staggering 45 million in the man-made famine known as the Great Leap Forward, yet more in the mayhem of the Cultural Revolution. Even the less bloodthirsty regimes of Eastern Europe killed and imprisoned their citizens on a shocking scale. In the Soviet Union, 2.75 million people were in the Gulag at Stalin’s death. The numbers were greatly reduced thereafter, but until the very end of the Soviet system its inhabitants lived in the knowledge that there was nothing but their own guile to protect them from an arbitrary and corrupt state. Other communist regimes around the world, including the very durable dictatorships in North Korea and Cuba, were strikingly similar in the miseries they inflicted on their own citizens.

The various socialist regimes could not even justify their murderous behavior by providing those they spared with higher living standards than their counterparts living under capitalism. On the contrary, they were economically disastrous. The collectivization of agriculture invariably reduced farming productivity. A substantial proportion of the victims of communism lost their lives because of the famines that resulted from collectivization in the Soviet Union and China. North Korea had a similarly disastrous experience. Central planning was a miserable failure for reasons long ago identified by Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich Hayek, and Janos Kornai, amongst others. Indeed, the economic performance of strictly socialist countries got worse over time because of rigidities and perverse incentives institutionalized by planning.

Moreover, the evidence is clear that, as countries moved away from socialist policies of state ownership and toward a greater reliance on market forces, they did better economically. The most striking example — but one of many — is that of China, which achieved a true great leap forward in economic output after beginning to dismantle restrictions on private initiative in 1978. After the collapse of “real existing socialism” in Central and Eastern Europe in 1989 and the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, there was widespread recognition (the “Washington consensus”) that all countries would benefit from reducing state ownership of the economy through privatization and from lowering marginal tax rates. […] the highest marginal personal income tax rate was reduced in nearly all Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries between the mid-1970s and mid-2000s.

Niall Ferguson, “Capitalism, Socialism and Nationalism: Lessons from History”, 2020-02.

October 4, 2026

Jaguar – a case study in brand suicide

Filed under: Britain, Business, India, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

The Jaguar E-type was, in my opinion, the best-looking car of the 20th century. It was all downhill from that point, sadly:

Jaguar killed itself. No villain required, no recession to blame, no supply chain disruption to hide behind. Tata Motors bought a fading but salvageable brand in 2008 for $2.3 billion and spent the next fifteen years turning it into a case study in how to destroy capital.

The rebranding campaign of late 2024 was the public execution. Jaguar dropped its leaping cat logo, fired its entire existing customer demographic via press release, and replaced a century of racing heritage with a pastel-colored advertisement featuring zero cars. The marketing team apparently decided the path to profitability ran directly through alienating the people who actually bought Jaguars. Brilliant.

The rebrand was just the visible wound. The rot started earlier. Jaguar spent years producing vehicles with reliability ratings that made Land Rover look like a Swiss watch, while charging Mercedes money for the privilege. The F-Pace, the E-Pace, the I-Pace: each one a beautiful object that dealers apologized for in advance. You bought the badge and got a subscription to your mechanic’s vacation fund.

The pivot to an all-electric lineup, announced with great fanfare in 2021, then delayed, then sort-of-delayed-again, captured everything wrong with a company led by government subsidy chasers rather than engineers. Jaguar chased EV tax credits and green virtue points instead of fixing the fundamental problem. Nobody trusted the cars.

Markets are merciless precisely because they are honest. Customers stopped buying, and no amount of rebranding or regulatory coddling reversed that verdict. Capital allocated to a brand that cannot hold a customer is capital destroyed. Tata learned this lesson expensively. You, having never bought the car, learned it for free.

The ad campaign is just a sign on the door that reads, “This company is woke trash”. The real rot lies beneath the surface. Firing the marketing agency won’t change that.

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