Quotulatiousness

July 20, 2020

History Hijinks: Plague

Filed under: China, Europe, Health, History, Humour — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 06:00

Overly Sarcastic Productions
Published 17 Jul 2020

Escape the worries of our modern world by visiting the high middle ages and learning about something esoteric and irrelevant: Plague!

In this video, I attempt to actually teach you something about how the medieval world worked and how it responded to this existential threat, rather than dredging up 3rd grade plague facts for easy views. Oops, did I say that out loud?

SOURCES & Further Reading: The Black Death: The World’s Most Devastating Plague via The Great Courses by Dorsey Armstrong, “From Plague Doctor to PPE” by Bernadette Banner (https://youtu.be/ZniriC-jTHg), “Biological Warfare at the Siege of Caffa” from the CDC (https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/8/9…)

This video was edited by Sophia Ricciardi AKA “Indigo”. https://www.sophiakricci.com/

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July 16, 2020

Canada should welcome immigrants from Hong Kong with open arms

Filed under: Australia, Britain, Cancon, China — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

The PRC communist government is clearly set on extinguishing the unique status of Hong Kong within China and a lot of Hong Kong residents are considering getting out before the gloves come off. Canada should join Britain and Australia in offering a safe refuge, regardless of the attitude of Beijing. Sadly, this probably won’t happen, as Justin Trudeau has demonstrated that he’s willing to kow-tow whenever his paymasters demand:

“Hong Kong night Panorama” by Andos_pics is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

Britain has taken the lead by announcing that Hongkongers holding a British National Overseas (BNO) Passport will be allowed to live and work in the UK for five years, after which they can apply for settled status, and, one year later, citizenship. This could mean that almost three million people will be able to relocate to Britain if they so choose. In response to earlier British overtures along these lines, China made clear in no uncertain terms that Hong Kong is their concern, and that the UK should mind its own business, with China’s foreign ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian saying that the “UK has no right to lecture or interfere in China’s internal affairs …”.

However, a BNO Passport is only available to Hong Kong residents born before the 1997 transfer of the city back to Chinese control, which leaves around 4.5 million of the city’s residents — including many of the younger generation born after the handover occurred — unable to access that option.

This is why this sort of idea must be expanded on more broadly by all liberal democracies, who should consider granting special dispensations allowing Hong Kong residents who wish to emigrate to do so. The United States is considering following Britain’s example, and Australia has opened the door to citizenship for any Hongkongers with work or student visas. Hopefully, they are just the first of many.

It wouldn’t be the first time liberal democracies have taken in a large influx of exiles from specific countries.

Consider the influx of refugees which started with the Boat People, who originally were mostly South Vietnamese fleeing after the U.S. pulled out of the war and their country fell to the communist north. They, and many more from other southeast Asian countries who fled their homes in the 1970s and 80s, many ending up in Western nations. The United States took in the majority, with Canada, Australia, and a few others accepting large numbers as well.

There are some major differences however when it comes to opening our doors to residents of Hong Kong who wish to leave the increasingly oppressive rule from Beijing. Unlike many who flee war-torn or poverty-stricken nations searching for a better life, Hongkongers are among the most educated and wealthy people on the planet. Most important though, many of them love freedom, and have grown up in a society where many of the things we claim to value — rule of law, personal liberty, freedom of conscience, free speech, and a free market — are (or, at least, were) paramount.

Accepting Hongkongers into our countries would be good for us. It seems that in the last few decades, liberal democracies have been growing complacent about our hard-won freedoms. We have forgotten or ignored history, and seem not to realize that the foundations on which our freedoms are built need constant maintenance and defense.

July 7, 2020

Taking stock after the worst of the Wuhan Coronavirus epidemic

Filed under: China, Europe, Health, Liberty, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

David Warren discusses an intractable “problem”:

I do not suppose it makes any practical difference what I have to say about a public health problem that invades the lives of billions; nor that readers will take me for a reliable epidemiologist when I say that the worst danger of that Batflu has now passed. (Infection rates spike, but the power of the virus to torture and kill has relented. The death rates continue downward.)

Nevertheless, I think there is some value in stating, even restating, the obvious — when what is obvious is in conflict with sensational reports, and the aggressive distortions of mass media, profiting from panic.

This Batflu became — more than any previous epidemic — a political issue, instantaneously. This is evident in the way it was spread, quite intentionally, by the Communist Party of China. (They shut down everything in Wuhan, except flights to Europe and America.) In all countries with democratic institutions, the disease became the centre of political attention, and unprecedented lockdowns were ordered. Likewise, unprecedented schemes of surveillance have significantly changed the relation between governments and governed, entirely for the worse. By means of current technology, the former will be able to perpetuate these changes, leaving those who wish to recover old liberties nowhere to hide.

Moreover, this is done by public demand. “The peeple” are easy to manipulate, once they have been frightened. The great majority of men, now and through the past, never cared about freedom. It has always been a minority concern, “for the intellectuals.” The “silent majority” will take their freedom, but only after their comfort and safety have been assured. The right to choose among consumer products is enough for them.

There are revolutions, such as the one that is now being attempted by the Left, but these never last. Either they are extinguished, under the wet blanket of public apathy, or the revolutionists succeed in installing a truly monstrous regime. Only thus, can they prolong their evil. Two generations of half-educated, indoctrinated, university grads favour a doctrinal dictatorship. Those still young are full of malign energy.

July 6, 2020

Cold War Two is upon us, but it’s not all Trump’s fault (believe it or not)

Filed under: China, Economics, Government, Military, Pacific, USA — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Niall Ferguson on the rapid drop in temperature in US/Chinese relations in the last eight years:

President Donald Trump and PRC President Xi Jinping at the G20 Japan Summit in Osaka, 29 June, 2019.
Cropped from an official White House photo by Shealah Craighead via Wikimedia Commons.

“We are in the foothills of a Cold War.” Those were the words of Henry Kissinger when I interviewed him at the Bloomberg New Economy Forum in Beijing last November.

The observation in itself was not wholly startling. It had seemed obvious to me since early last year that a new Cold War — between the U.S. and China — had begun. This insight wasn’t just based on interviews with elder statesmen. Counterintuitive as it may seem, I had picked up the idea from binge-reading Chinese science fiction.

First, the history. What had started out in early 2018 as a trade war over tariffs and intellectual property theft had by the end of the year metamorphosed into a technology war over the global dominance of the Chinese company Huawei Technologies Co. in 5G network telecommunications; an ideological confrontation in response to Beijing’s treatment of the Uighur minority in China’s Xinjiang region and the pro-democracy protesters in Hong Kong; and an escalation of old frictions over Taiwan and the South China Sea.

Nevertheless, for Kissinger, of all people, to acknowledge that we were in the opening phase of Cold War II was remarkable.

Since his first secret visit to Beijing in 1971, Kissinger has been the master-builder of that policy of U.S.-Chinese engagement which, for 45 years, was a leitmotif of U.S. foreign policy. It fundamentally altered the balance of power at the mid-point of the Cold War, to the disadvantage of the Soviet Union. It created the geopolitical conditions for China’s industrial revolution, the biggest and fastest in history. And it led, after China’s accession to the World Trade Organization, to that extraordinary financial symbiosis which Moritz Schularick and I christened “Chimerica” in 2007.

How did relations between Beijing and Washington sour so quickly that even Kissinger now speaks of Cold War?

The conventional answer to that question is that President Donald Trump has swung like a wrecking ball into the “liberal international order” and that Cold War II is only one of the adverse consequences of his “America First” strategy.

Yet that view attaches too much importance to the change in U.S. foreign policy since 2016, and not enough to the change in Chinese foreign policy that came four years earlier, when Xi Jinping became general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party. Future historians will discern that the decline and fall of Chimerica began in the wake of the global financial crisis, as a new Chinese leader drew the conclusion that there was no longer any need to hide the light of China’s ambition under the bushel that Deng Xiaoping had famously recommended.

July 5, 2020

Andrew Sullivan – “There is no doubt at this point that communist China is a genocidal state”

Filed under: China, Government, Liberty, Politics, Religion — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

In his latest column, Andrew Sullivan discusses China’s latest outrages against groups within China:

Protest against the Chinese government in Hong Kong, 25 November 2019.
Photo by Studio Incendo via Wikimedia Commons

Genocide is not measured simply by the number of human beings in a demographic group who have been killed. Such numbers vary. The pogroms in Europe of the 14th century killed far, far fewer Jews than died in the 20th-century Holocaust, but it would be crazy not to see a very similar eliminationist impulse. It’s the genocidal intent that defines a genocide. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum defines it as “the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group.” Their definition includes the following five categories:

  1. Killing members of the group.
  2. Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group.
  3. Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part.
  4. Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group.
  5. Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

There is no doubt at this point that communist China is a genocidal state. The regime is determined to coerce, kill, reeducate, and segregate its Uighur Muslim population, and to pursue eugenicist policies to winnow their ability to sustain themselves. The Associated Press just published an exhaustive and chilling account of the extent of the campaign, which was reportedly supported and seconded by the president of the United States when speaking with President-for-life Xi.

We already know about the reeducation camps. We found out this week the grisly detail that China may even have been exporting human-hair products taken from Uighur political prisoners in those camps. What the AP helps us better understand is how the regime is forcibly sterilizing Uighur women inside and outside the camps, attempting to control the Uighur population by assaulting basic reproductive freedom. Uighur families with multiple children are now in danger of being sent to camps for the crime of bringing Uighur kids into the world: “Time in a camp — what the government calls ‘education and training’ — for parents with too many children is written policy in at least three counties, notices found by [scholar Adrian] Zenz confirmed. In 2017, the Xinjiang government also tripled the already hefty fines for violating family planning laws for even the poorest residents — to at least three times the annual disposable income of the county.”

And the campaign of terror is working: “Birth rates in the mostly Uighur regions of Hotan and Kashgar plunged by more than 60% from 2015 to 2018, the latest year available in government statistics. Across the Xinjiang region, birth rates continue to plummet, falling nearly 24% last year alone — compared to just 4.2% nationwide, statistics show.” In the Uighur city of Hotan, over a third of all married women of childbearing age were sterilized in 2019 alone. And this is taking place in the context of a new campaign to increase the fertility and offspring of the majority Han Chinese. This is pure racial social engineering.

This genocidal dictatorship also took this past week to stomp all over what’s left of freedom in Hong Kong. Just before the anniversary of the end of British rule in Hong Kong, Beijing has introduced a new security law that all but eviscerates any freedom for dissent in the former British colony. It renders a variety of offenses that involve pro-democracy activism and criticism of the regime punishable by up to a lifetime in jail. The law is deliberately vague, was passed with no input from Hong Kong’s own government before its details were revealed, and criminalizes offenses such as “secession, subversion against the central Chinese government, terrorism, and colluding with foreign forces.”

The effect has been immediate: Key members of a leading dissident group, Demosisto, resigned, and the party has been disbanded. Throughout Hong Kong, businesses that had posted messages of support for the pro-democracy forces are swiftly removing them. People are deleting their social-media accounts for fear of imprisonment. A BBC reporter notes the immediate impact: “One contact of mine, a lawyer and human-rights activist, sent me a message shortly after the law was passed. ‘Please delete everything on this chat,’ he wrote.”

July 4, 2020

Australian defence expansion – “We’re not talking about Canada”

Filed under: Australia, China, Government, Military — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

The Australian government has embarked on a ten-year military expansion program that is clearly directed against recent Chinese bullying in the region:

HMAS Adelaide (LHD 01) and HMAS Canberra (LHD 02), based on the Spanish navy’s Juan Carlos I landing helicopter dock built by Navantia, and commissioned in November 2014 (Canberra) and December 2015 (Adelaide).
Photo by Tony Hisgett via Wikimedia Commons.

[Australian PM] Scott Morrison has unveiled a more aggressive defence strategy aimed at countering the rise of China, while warning that Australia faces regional challenges on a scale not seen since World War II.

The strategy increases the focus on the Indo-Pacific region, with the Prime Minister warning that Australia needs to prepare for a post-COVID-19 world that is “poorer, more dangerous and more disorderly”.

Australia will build a larger military that is focused on its immediate backyard, including new long-range anti-ship missiles, signalling a major shift in the nation’s defence strategy.

“We have not seen the conflation of global economic and strategic uncertainty now being experienced here in Australia in our region since the existential threat we faced when the global and regional order collapsed in the 1930s and 1940s,” the Prime Minister warned.

Mr Morrison also announced a commitment to spend $270 billion over the next decade on defence capabilities, including more potent strike weapons, cyber capabilities and a high-tech underwater surveillance system.

Over the four years, the Australian Defence Force (ADF) is expected to grow by 800 people, comprising 650 extra personnel for the Navy, 100 for the Air Force, and 50 for the Army.

According to Defence’s 2019-20 Budget Statement, the ADF was estimated to grow to 60,090 by this year, with 16,272 full-time public service staff.

Its budget was expected to grow to 2 per cent of Australia’s gross domestic product by 2020-21, “equating to approximately $200 billion in Australia’s defence capability over 10 years”, making the new announcement an increase of $70 billion to the department.

In a speech at the Australian Defence Force Academy Mr Morrison argued the Indo-Pacific is the “epicentre” of rising strategic competition and “the risk of miscalculation — and even conflict — is heightening”.

June 28, 2020

Operation Barbarossa – End of the Nazi-Soviet Alliance – WW2 – 096b – June 27 1941

Filed under: China, Germany, History, Japan, Military, Russia, WW2 — Tags: , , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 06:00

World War Two
Published 27 Jun 2020

Operation Barbarossa kicks off this week with action all along the front as German panzers pierce deep into the Soviet Union. Meanwhile, Claude Auchinleck becomes Commander of the Allied forces in the Middle East that capture Damascus.

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Sources:
– Imperial War Museum: E 3833, TR 841, E 1549, E 5448
– Bundesarchiv, CC-BY-SA 3.0: Bild 146-1990-044-13, Bild_183-B24575, Bild_101I-265-0048A-03, Bild_101I-208-0031-03, Bild_169-0443, Bild_101I-020-1262-35, Bild_101I-020-1272-21, Bundesarchiv_Bild_101I-209-0056-06
– Narodowe Archiwum Cyfrowe
– FDR Presidential Library & Museum

Archive by Screenocean/Reuters https://www.screenocean.com.

A TimeGhost chronological documentary produced by OnLion Entertainment GmbH.

“Viking” was the word for “Incel” in the early Middle Ages

Filed under: Books, China, Europe, Health, History, India, Military — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

At least, that’s one interpretation offered by Mary Harrington at UnHerd:

Europe According to the Vikings (1000) from Atlas of Prejudice 2 by Yanko Tsvetkov.

Last week, World War 3 nearly started in Ladakh. A dry, high-altitude region of Indian Kashmir on the Himalayan border with China, it’s been the site of escalating tensions and military buildup for some time. On June 15, the first physical confrontation between the Indian and Chinese militaries for 45 years erupted, killing at least 20 Indian and 45 Chinese soldiers.

There are all sorts of geopolitical reasons cited for the escalating tension between the world’s two most populous countries, but there is one more central and timeless problem that is going to drive both countries towards violence and instability — women. Or a lack of them.

In his History of the Normans, written circa 1015, Dudo of St Quentin argued that the reason the Vikings went raiding was because they couldn’t find wives, an idea echoed by the Tudor antiquarian William Camden in his 1610 book Britannia. “Wikings”, Camden suggested, were what you got when there weren’t enough women to go round, resulting in an excess of young men hanging around full of machismo but without any prospect of finding a nice girl and settling down. (Viking literally means raider.)

So, whenever these spare males “multiply’d themselves to a burdensom community”, Camden reports that an area would draw lots. Those of the young troublemakers chosen in the lottery would be sent off on a ship to make a nuisance of themselves overseas. Which they did.

In evolutionary biology, the “operational sex ratio” is a term used to count the proportion of males and females in a given species that are seeking a reproductive mate. As soon as the ratio tilts away from 50:50, the sex that’s over-represented will have to compete to secure a mate from among the less-plentiful potential partners of the opposite sex.

Though they wouldn’t have used that phrase, both Dudo of St Quentin and William Camden were both describing this phenomenon in human males. Where potential wives are scarce and the “burdensom community” of spare men multiplies, the result is more violence and crime. One 2019 study showed that where polygyny — that is, multiple wives — is a social norm for higher-status men, attacks on neighbouring ethnic groups skyrocket. With a few men monopolising eligible women, the rest are forced to seek status and resources by attacking other tribes.

India and China both have an extremely “burdensom community” of spare males. The normal ratio of newborn boys to girls is around 105:100. But as Mara Hvistendahl documents in Unnatural Selection, thanks to prenatal ultrasound and sex-selective abortion the ratio in China is around 118:100, and 108:100 in India. In some regions of India, the ratio rises as high as 150 males to 100 females. Though sex-selective technology is now banned in India, it’s still widespread, and the country now has some 37 million more men than women. Studies estimate that China has around 30 million excess men.

June 27, 2020

Canada’s “Gang of 19” urges abject surrender and hostage exchange with China

Filed under: Cancon, China, Government, Law, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

As Canadian political life continues to revolve more and more around the Chinese model, we now have our very own political “gang”, just like China did!

“The Chinese People’s Liberation Army is the great school of Mao Zedong Thought”, 1969.
A poster from the Cultural Revolution, featuring an image of Chairman Mao.
Image via Wikimedia Commons.

A former leader of the New Democratic Party of Canada. A former Conservative foreign minister. Two former Liberal foreign ministers. Four former Canadian ambassadors to the United Nations, under Liberal and Tory governments. Two former Canadian ambassadors to the United States, under Liberal and Tory governments. A former Supreme Court justice. A former Liberal justice minister. A former Conservative senator. A flock of name-brand diplomats. Former CBC host Don Newman, for some reason.

This is the panoply of 19 elite opinion-makers that gathered in the Laurentian Boardroom at an online hotel and drafted a letter, released Wednesday, calling on Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to intervene in the extradition process, set Huawei CFO Meng Wangzhou free, and thereby secure the release of Canadians Michael Kovrig and Michael Spavor.

China, last seen denying the two men’s detention had anything to do with Meng, had changed its tune just hours earlier on Wednesday: Freeing her might “open up space for resolution to the situation of the two Canadians,” foreign ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian said.

And who stands in the way? A prime minister who was perfectly happy to stick his thumb on the scales of justice to save a cherished member of Quebec Inc. from the indignity of prosecution for rather flamboyant alleged corporate malfeasance in and concerning Gaddafi-era Libya (or to “save jobs,” if you prefer, although it emerged no one in Justin Trudeau’s government had bothered to inquire how many jobs might actually be lost if SNC-Lavalin were convicted).

You can hardly blame China for noting the precedent. And it’s sorely fitting that the Gang of 19 addressed their letter to Trudeau rather than to the fellow who would actually have to give the order: Justice Minister David Lametti. We all know who calls the shots in that particular relationship. Perhaps it’s best we just admit it.

Colby Cosh also finds the advice proffered to the Prime Minister to be … less than admirable:

Screen capture of a BBC News report on Canadians Michael Kovrig and Michael Spavor facing espionage charges in China.

I wanted to discuss the letter written by the 19 geriatric Canadian worthies who encouraged the Prime Minister to trade Huawei executive Meng Wanzhou, in Canadian custody fighting extradition to the U.S., for the “two (Canadian) Michaels” detained on ill-defined espionage charges in China. Colleague Chris Selley has gone over the ground, but that’s show biz for you. Selley concluded his overview by pointing out that the letter argues perversely for “surrender, then victory.” With the Meng-Michaels standoff out of the way, the various ex-diplomats and superannuated politicians argued, Canada could use the opportunity for a fresh foreign-policy start, deciding what “tough steps” ought to be taken against China. If any.

The letter, part of a campaign on the two Michaels’ behalf led by ex-Supreme Court Justice Louise Arbour and ex-justice minister Allan Rock, is self-refuting in parts. Yielding “to bullying or blackmail” is “repugnant,” the authors admit, while advising just that. But “resisting China’s pressure is no guarantee that it will never be applied again in the future … China might well decide that next time it will need to escalate by detaining more than two Canadians.”

The implication, if this argument is to have any force, is that actively rewarding China’s abduction of our citizens is a jim-dandy way of making sure it never happens again. The problem with this reasoning is obvious, but the authors are also careful not to define victory too precisely. They say that letting Meng go and getting Michael Kovrig and Michael Spavor back would permit Canada to “declare its position on Huawei’s involvement in the deployment of 5G technology in Canada,” a decision “that has been postponed time and again.”

Sooo … the authors think we should slam the door on Huawei, whose CEO is Meng’s father? They don’t say so! They only say that settling this quarrel would make it easier for us to decide. And they are only slightly clearer on issues of human rights in China and Hong Kong, which our current government and foreign service are allegedly being shy about “so as not to make the situation worse for the Canadian prisoners.”

June 23, 2020

Pushback for Chinese aggression in the Himalayas

Filed under: China, India, Military — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In Quillette, Cleo Paskal outlines the Chinese military action last week and a few of the reactions in civil society:

The western portion of the Line of Actual Control, separating the Eastern Ladakh and Aksai Chin (map by CIA). In the Demchok sector, only two claim lines are shown. The line was the focus of a brief war in 1962.
Wikimedia Commons.

High in the Himalayan mountains, Chinese soldiers ambushed Indian troops this week, resulting in a brutal battle on the Indian side of their shared border. Twenty Indians were killed, while China won’t disclose its losses. It was the deadliest confrontation on the border in over 40 years. As a result, some Indian strategists are openly discussing recognizing Taiwan and providing more visibility to the Dalai Lama, state-owned telecoms are blocking Chinese equipment from 4G upgrades, and millions of Indians downloaded an app that helps remove Chinese apps from their phones (before Google removed it). All of this comes at a time when much of the world remains angry at China’s leaders for their initial handling of the COVID-19 crisis.

This week’s apparent provocation is part of a larger recent pattern with China. From the South China Sea, to Taiwan, to Hong Kong, Beijing has been seeking to change facts on the ground in a way that benefits its own strategic and economic interests. In a recent Atlantic Council discussion of the India-China border issue (convened before the latest fighting), senior American diplomat Ambassador Alice Wells summed the situation up well: “There’s a method here to Chinese operations. [A]nd it is that constant aggression, the constant attempt to shift the norms, to shift what is the status quo, that has to be resisted.”

For decades China has tried to expand its strategic reach along its de facto south-western border through the invasion of Tibet, land swaps with Pakistan, and war with India. To this end, China treats British Empire-era maps as political props to variously brandish or dismiss, as best suits Beijing’s goals. For example, it effectively accepted the 1914-era McMahon Line delineation in its border agreement with Myanmar, but rejects it with India.

The Line of Actual Control (LAC) separating China and India runs through rugged, high-altitude terrain that has witnessed multiple conflicts going back to the 1962 India-China border war. In recent weeks, there have been Chinese incursions at several points along the LAC, reportedly involving thousands of troops. In some spots, the Chinese military is digging in on the Indian side, while expanding its already considerable support infrastructure on their side of the LAC.

Delhi is particularly concerned about Chinese advances near India’s Daulat Beg Oldie (DBO) high-altitude military airfield, an essential Indian forward base that provides oversight of the strategic Karakoram Highway (KH) linking China’s western Xinjiang Autonomous Region with Pakistan, including the Gwadar Port on the Indian Ocean. It is a key component of the multi-billion-dollar China-Pakistan Economic Corridor.

Legends Summarized: The Journey To The West (Part VII)

Filed under: Books, China, History, Humour, Religion — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Overly Sarcastic Productions
Published 27 Dec 2019

Journey to the West Kai, episode 4: Trouble in Taoist Town!

Thrills! Excitement! Pigsy takes a bath! Sandy fights an alligator! Monkey helps Tripitaka cheat on a high-stakes game show! And as always, everyone forgets about the horse!

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June 21, 2020

Burma Victory (1945)

Filed under: Asia, Britain, China, History, India, Japan, Military, USA, WW2 — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

PeriscopeFilm
Published 31 May 2016

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Made in 1945, BURMA VICTORY is a British documentary about the Burma Campaign during World War Two. It was directed by Roy Boulting. The introduction to the film outlines the geography and climate of Burma, and the extent of the Japanese conquests. The film then describes the establishment of the South East Asian Command (SEAC) under Mountbatten, “a born innovator and firm believer in the unorthodox”, and gives a comparatively detailed account of subsequent military events, including the Battle of Imphal-Kohima and Slim’s drive on Mandalay, Arakan landings, the northern offensive of the Americans and Chinese under Stilwell, and the roles played by Chindits and Merrill’s Marauders. The film ends with the capture of Rangoon and the Japanese surrender. The film focuses on the difficulties of climate, terrain, the endemic diseases of dysentery, malaria, etc., the vital role of air supplies, the shattering of the myth of Japanese invincibility and the secondary role of the Burma campaign in overall Allied strategy.

This film represents a British look at the campaign and was the pet project of Admiral Lord Louis Mountbatten, Supreme Allied Commander, South-East Asia, and he planned it as a joint Anglo-American production. But this scheme foundered over the inability of the U.S. leadership and British to agree on the main theme of the film. The British wanted it to concentrate on the drive southwards to liberate Burma. The Americans, anxious not to be seen to be participating in the restoration of the British Empire, wanted to emphasize the heroic building of the Ledo Road and the drive northwards to relieve the Chinese. In the end the two sides went their separate ways. The Americans produced the Ronald Reagan narrated film The Stilwell Road and the British made Burma Victory. It was the final production of the Army Film and Photographic Unit (AFPU) and was directed, like Desert Victory (1943), by Roy Boulting. Not released until after the war was over, it was hailed and promoted as “the real Burma film”.

The Burma Campaign in the South-East Asian theatre of World War II was fought primarily between the forces of the British Empire and China, with support from the United States, against the forces of the Empire of Japan, Thailand, and the Indian National Army. British Empire forces peaked at around 1,000,000 land, naval and air forces, and were drawn primarily from British India, with British Army forces (equivalent to 8 regular infantry divisions and 6 tank regiments), 100,000 East and West African colonial troops, and smaller numbers of land and air forces from several other Dominions and Colonies. The Burmese Independence Army was trained by the Japanese and spearheaded the initial attacks against British Empire forces.

The campaign had a number of notable features. The geographical characteristics of the region meant that factors like weather, disease and terrain had a major effect on operations. The lack of transport infrastructure placed an emphasis on military engineering and air transport to move and supply troops, and evacuate wounded. The campaign was also politically complex, with the British, the United States and the Chinese all having different strategic priorities.

South East Asia Command (SEAC) was the body set up to be in overall charge of Allied operations in the South-East Asian Theatre during World War II. Admiral Lord Louis Mountbatten served as Supreme Allied Commander of the South East Asia Command from October 1943 through the disbandment of SEAC in 1946.

This film is part of the Periscope Film LLC archive, one of the largest historic military, transportation, and aviation stock footage collections in the USA. Entirely film backed, this material is available for licensing in 24p HD and 2k. For more information visit http://www.PeriscopeFilm.com

June 20, 2020

History-Makers: Confucius

Filed under: China, History, Humour, Religion — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 06:00

Overly Sarcastic Productions
Published 19 Jun 2020

Welcome to the challenge run of History-Makers, where I attempt to give insightful historical context to someone whose backstory is almost entirely blank.

SOURCES & Further Reading: Confucius: A Very Short Introduction by Gardner, China: A History by Keay, The Analects of Confucius, The Mencius.

This video was edited by Sophia Ricciardi AKA “Indigo”. https://www.sophiakricci.com/
Our content is intended for teenage audiences and up.

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June 17, 2020

Alcibiades, the first recorded iconoclast, but far from the last

Filed under: Britain, China, Germany, History, Middle East, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

James Heartfield on the modern day resurgence of iconoclasm:

“Drunken Alcibiades interrupting the Symposium”, an engraving from 1648 by Pietro Testa (1611-1650)
Via Wikimedia Commons.

… far more often, the attacks on public symbols are indicative of a breakdown in social solidarity — often with alarming consequences. For activists seeking to win popular support, knocking down statues is a high-risk strategy that can provoke the opposite sentiments to those hoped for. The futurist Marinetti’s proposal to fill in the canals of Venice with concrete to make modern roads is a witty way to make a point, but not a sound policy.

Alcibiades was perhaps the first recorded statue vandal. One night in 415 BC he knocked all the stone cocks off the statues of Hermes in Athens. In 1497, the friar Girolamo Savonarola launched a Bonfire of the Vanities in which artworks, books and statues were destroyed out of a fear they would tempt people away from God. As any lover of old English churches knows, the furies of the Puritan revolution led to the destruction and defacing of Catholic saints’ statues and paintings.

In the modern era, the temptation to destroy monuments has been strong. In the First World War, Britain’s local authorities changed German-sounding names of streets like Bismarck Road — now Waterlow Road — while bully boys attacked German-owned shops. In 1933, Nazi students in Germany organised bonfires of subversive books, while the Reich organised an exhibition of “degenerate” modernist art. The burning of books only served as a trial run for the extermination of people, as the symbolic slaughter failed to yield the results of a “cleansed” Germany.

People often make the point that there are no statues of Hitler in Germany — though those were not taken down by Germans, but by the Allied occupiers. You can still see Albert Speer’s Zeppelinfeld and grandstand in Nuremberg, where many of Hitler’s rallies took place, though not much else of his Nazi architecture survives. Mussolini’s architects, Giuseppe Terragni and Marcello Piacentini, did better — much of their absurdly grandiose work survives. The model of an Allied-led “denazification” was in the minds of the US-led forces that overthrew Saddam Hussein in 2003. The destruction of his statue in Baghdad was largely staged by the allies.

Under the Maoist regimes in China and the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, some of the worst atrocities after the Nazis were carried out. Mao’s “Cultural Revolution” against the “four olds” led to the destruction of books and artworks. Later, there were showtrials and the politically incorrect were battered by the mob. In the wreckage of Cambodia, Pol Pot led a terrifying war on alleged capitalist-roaders and even intellectuals — who could be handily identified by the fact they wore glasses — that led to millions being killed. Pol Pot declared a “year zero” — that all civilisation before the Khmer Rouge took power would be cancelled. Tragically, the wholesale wiping out of Cambodian culture was only a prelude to the extermination of much of its population. The sentiment of wiping out the wrong history was repeated in the war that al-Qaeda-inspired regimes in Afghanistan and Mali conducted against books and statues that did not match their own Islamist views.

In Soviet Russia, when the communist-allied artists of the Proletkult organisation argued that all Tsarist culture should be expunged, the Bolshevik leader Lenin took them to task for “rejecting the most valuable achievements of the bourgeois epoch”. Instead, he said, they should assimilate and re-work “everything of value in the more than 2,000 years of the development of human thought and culture”. Sadly, Lenin’s wise advice was lost on the Stalinist regimes that followed, during which the policy oscillated between futurist iconoclasm and maudlin Russian sentimentality. History got its revenge in eastern Europe when most of the ubiquitous Lenin and Marx statues came down in the 1990s.

June 16, 2020

Legends Summarized: The Journey To The West (Part VI)

Filed under: Books, China, History, Humour, Religion — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Overly Sarcastic Productions
Published 14 Dec 2018

JOURNEY TO THE WEST KAI, EPISODE 3: FAMILY FEUD!

Action! Excitement! Faces from the past! Kuan Yin discovers an exciting new acupuncture technique! Pigsy is unexpectedly skilled at CPR!

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