Quotulatiousness

May 11, 2026

“We’ve entered the pre-violence rhetorical phase of the classic communist cycle”

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

You have to have noticed that progressives all seem to have recently decide en masse that we need to liquidate eliminate expropriate the billionaire class. It’s been done in the past, and modern progressives seem to be unable to spot the pattern, even as they work hard to bring it back to life by constantly scapegoating the wealthy (machine translated from Brivael Le Pogam’s original French post):

Lydia is putting her finger on something that no one wants to name clearly: we’ve entered the pre-violence rhetorical phase of the classic communist cycle.

The script is documented, archived, and it repeats itself identically for a century. Before every mass massacre carried out in the name of Marxism, there are always 5 to 15 years of public designation of a category of people as “the enemy to be taken down”. Not a debate on public policies. Not a critique of inequalities. A methodical dehumanization of an entire class.

In the USSR in the 1920s, it was the kulaks. Lenin wrote as early as 1918 that it was necessary to “exterminate the kulaks as a class”, an expression repeated word for word by Stalin ten years later. Result: 4 million peasants deported, several million dead in the Holodomor.

In Maoist China, it was the landlords and “class enemies”. Mao orchestrates public “struggle sessions” where neighbors, children, former employees are forced to denounce, humiliate, and beat. Tally from the land reform alone: 1 to 2 million executions, not counting what follows.

In Cambodia, it was the “new people”: city dwellers, intellectuals, people wearing glasses. Khmer Rouge propaganda designated them for years as parasites before massacring them. 1.7 million dead in 4 years.

Now look at what’s happening in the United States in 2026.

Hasan Piker, who reaches millions of young men on Twitch, speaks openly of the “blood of f***ing capitalists”. Not in 1968 in a Trotskyist cell, in 2026 on the platform most watched by 18-25 year olds.

Zohran Mamdani, elected mayor of New York, films viral videos in front of billionaires’ buildings, exactly where Brian Thompson, CEO of UnitedHealthcare, was assassinated last year by Luigi Mangione. The latter was turned into a pop icon by a part of the American left in less than 48 hours. T-shirts, fan art, romanticization of the murderer.

This isn’t “political passion”. It’s phase 1 of the protocol. The public designation of a category of humans as legitimately hateable, followed by the valorization of those who take action.

The “normal” reaction of a healthy democracy should be the immediate social and professional isolation of these voices. What’s happening: they top podcast charts, they’re elected officials, and they get favorable media coverage.

History doesn’t stutter. It copy-pastes. And the first victims are always surprised to discover, too late, that the speech they found “a bit excessive but oh well” was actually the clear warning that a pit was being dug for them.

Lydia is right to say it. And she’ll be even more right in five years when we reread these tweets.

And more:

And if you’re reading this thinking, “This doesn’t concern me, I’m not a billionaire”, stop for two seconds and really think about it.

Because that’s exactly what the Russian peasants told themselves in 1918 when people started talking about the “bourgeois”. They applauded, or they looked the other way. It wasn’t their problem. They weren’t rich.

Ten years later, they were called kulaks. And “kulak“, in Stalinist practice, meant any peasant who owned one more cow than his neighbor, who had dared to hire a seasonal worker, who had a slightly better-kept barn. 4 million deported. Several million dead.

That’s exactly what the small Chinese shopkeepers told themselves in 1949, when Mao went after the “great landowners”. Not their problem. They just ran a little store. Five years later, they too were classified as “class enemies”, stripped of everything, publicly humiliated, sometimes beaten to death by their own neighbors.

That’s exactly what the Cambodian schoolteachers told themselves in 1970, when the Khmer Rouge talked about “urban exploiters”. Not their problem. They barely earned enough to live on. In 1975, knowing how to read was enough to sign your death warrant.

The communist mechanism NEVER stops at the ultra-rich. Never. It’s a historical law as solid as gravity.

Why? Because fundamentally, the communist doesn’t hate wealth. He hates individual emancipation. He hates the very idea that a man can build something that belongs to him, decide his own life, refuse the collective. Private property isn’t an economic detail to him — it’s the metaphysical enemy. Because someone who owns something is someone who can say no.

So if you have an apartment you spent 15 years paying off, you’re concerned. If you have a small business, a shop, a sole proprietorship, you’re concerned. If you have a savings plan, a bank book, stocks, you’re concerned. If you have a family home in the provinces, you’re concerned. If you work hard to pass something on to your kids, you’re at the top of the next lists.

Billionaires are just the first course. Always. Because there are few of them and they’re easy to point out. They’re the appetizers for the machine. The main course, historically, is you.

And meanwhile, a lot of people read threads like this, nod their heads, and don’t share. Don’t comment. Don’t take a stand. Out of fear of being labeled “right-wing”, “reactionary”, “too political on LinkedIn”. Out of comfort. Out of social cowardice.

Know that this silence has a precise historical cost. Every time a society has tipped into this madness, it did so because the reasonable majority stayed silent too long, thinking it would all blow over on its own.

It never blows over on its own.

May 6, 2026

The Korean War Week 98: No Peace at Panmunjom – May 5, 1952

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

The Korean War by Indy Neidell
Published 5 May 2026

At the end of last week the UN presented a peace package proposal to the Communists at the peace talks, but that package has been rejected. The only issue still left to clear up is that of POW repatriation, but that seems insurmountable, at least for the time being. In the field, there are ambushes, skirmishes, and night patrols, but still no larger scale actions, and the temperature at Koje-Do POW camp continues to rise and rise, perhaps nearing a boiling point.

00:00 Intro
01:34 Recap
02:09 The Package Rejected
03:58 Night Patrols
08:32 The Fighting
14:13 Koje-Do
15:58 Summary
16:15 Conclusion

May 5, 2026

QotD: Why China never adopted war elephants

Filed under: China, History, Military, Quotations — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

If I have any readers familiar with the armies of China during the Warring States, Han Dynasty or Three Kingdoms Period, they may have already guessed my conclusion for China. China never flirted with the war elephant the way the great powers of the ancient Mediterranean did, although the Han in particular had far greater resources than any of these save imperial Rome and far easier access to elephants to boot. Chinese emperors received elephants and elephant handlers often enough as tribute or spoils from war. And yet, no war elephants. As Trautmann (2015) notes, “the absence of the war elephant in China is … the result of a deliberate choice”.

Trautmann (2015) finds the solution in land-use patterns: China had simply converted so much of its pasture and forest to crop-land, in a densely settled city-and-agriculture land-use pattern that incorporating large numbers of elephants was not just prohibitive, but also culturally foreign. And there’s something to this, though I don’t buy it completely. Absolutely, Chinese land-use patterns would make elephants a lot more expensive to maintain than in India or even Rome. Highly productive farmland would likely have to be turned over to elephant pasture. That said, Chinese rulers had embraced the chariot and cavalry, so such things could be done, if the military or political calculus made them worth doing. But they weren’t done.

Instead, I tend to think that the same basic calculus that applied for Rome applies neatly for China – elephants fare poorly in societies with access to large numbers of disciplined infantrymen who can be trained in anti-elephant tactics. And this was certainly true of China, which had disciplined infantry to spare. Also, Han armies seem to have relied on close integration of missile weapons and polearms, meaning that they had the same sort of integrated light infantry support that the legion of the Roman Republic did. Later Chinese armies, as Trautmann briefly notes, had no problem defeating elephants in battle.

As with Rome, in China, elephants seem to have been a military solution looking for a problem to solve – and never found it. For one Chinese dynasty after another, the major military threats were either peer competitors (during periods of political fragmentation) whose disciplined infantry armies were no more vulnerable to elephants than Rome’s, or else steppe nomads. Given the tremendous logistical difficulties of operating even small armies out on the open steppe, attempting to take war elephants there would have been the height of stupidity. Elephants weren’t going to stop the Mongols – to be fair, not much stopped the Mongols (we’ll get into India, Mughals and elephants next time).

Bret Devereaux, “Collections: War Elephants, Part II: Elephants against Wolves”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2019-08-02.

April 30, 2026

China’s weaker-than-it-seems strategic position

Filed under: China, Economics, Food, Middle East, Military — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, ESR expands on a post by Tom Kratman about the strategic weakness of the current Chinese government:

Tom didn’t explain his second assertion, but it’s important so I’m going to do it.

China is in the worst strategic position of any great power in history because it is critically dependent on resources it has to import, and it doesn’t have control of the sea lanes over which it imports them.

China is neither food nor energy self-sufficient. It needs to import pork from the United States, grain from Africa, coal from Australia, and oil from the Middle East to keep its population fed and its factories running.

Naval blockades at about three critical chokepoints (Hormuz, Malacca, Sunda) would cripple the Chinese economy within months, possibly within weeks. China does not have the blue-water navy required to contrast control of those chokepoints. The moment any first-rate naval power or even a second-rate like India decides China needs to be stopped, it’s pretty much game over.

As a completely separate issue thanks to the one-child policy, Chinese population probably peaked in 2006 and has been declining ever since. Every year in the foreseeable future they will have fewer military-age males than they do now. Most of those males are only sons; their deaths would wipe out entire family lines, giving the Chinese people an extremely low tolerance for war casualties.

Then there’s the glass jaw. The Three Gorges Dam. Which is already in some peril even without a war — you can compare photographs over time and see that it’s sagging. If anyone gets annoyed enough to pop that dam thing with a bunker-buster or a pony nuke, the resulting floods will kill millions and wipe out the strip of central China that is by far the country’s most industrially and agriculturally productive region.

The Chinese haven’t fought a war since 1971. They lost. Against Vietnam. The institutional knowledge that could potentially fit their army for doing anything more ambitious than suppressing regional warlordism does not exist.

I could go on. But I think I’ve made Tom’s statements sufficiently understandable already.

The position of the Three Gorges Dam on the Yangtze River in Hubei Province, showing the major cities downstream of the dam.
Image by Rolfmueller via Wikimedia Commons.

And Tom Kratman responds:

Almost perfect; you missed four tricks.

1. People, when we talk about blockading China, imagine that we’re talking about a civilized stop and search. Uh, uh; we will designate a no go zone and sink without further warning anything that enters it.

2. Our blockade will be distant, well out of range of those Oh-they’re-just-too-terrible-for-words (but never tested) DF-21s. [Wiki] (You did sort of address this, but not in so many words.)

3. We can blow the levees on the Yellow River, too, to kill many millions more and destroy still more industry (it flows above ground).

4. China not only doesn’t have the navy to contest with us, it can never have that navy. Why not? Because there’s only so much wealth to go around; China is surrounded on all sides by enemies with anywhere from decent to quite good armies, any or all of which might take a stab (pun intended) at carving China up like a turkey. They must put a lot more money and effort and manpower into stymying those than they can ever put into meeting us and Japan.

April 29, 2026

The Korean War Week 97: A Peace Proposal Package – April 28, 1952

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

The Korean War by Indy Neidell
Published 28 Apr 2026

There is what should be major news this week as the UN gives the Communists a peace proposal package at long last that addresses the remaining three issues to solve. It does not seem that it will be accepted by the Communist side, though, with the only sticking point being the issue of POW repatriation. There’s also still more unrest and protest at Koje-Do POW camp. And it looks like we’ll be getting a new UN forces commander, since Matt Ridgway will soon head to Europe to take over NATO command there.

00:00 Intro
00:24 Recap
00:56 Truman and Ike
02:34 April 28th
07:14 POW Rations
10:37 Notes
11:05 Summary
11:20 Conclusion

April 22, 2026

The Korean War Week 96: Korean Marines Leapfrog the Han – April 21, 1952

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

The Korean War by Indy Neidell
Published 21 Apr 2026

UN Command completes its screening of the 170,000 military and civilian POWs they hold to see how many of them would violently resist repatriation, and it turns out it’s most of them. The Communists are furious. This cannot be good for the armistice negotiations. We also take a look at the defense possibilities the Marines have in their new positions and which Chinese forces oppose them.

00:00 Intro
00:55 Recap
01:32 POW Screening
07:26 The Marines
08:56 The Chinese
13:37 Summary
13:53 Conclusion

QotD: Traditional Chinese approaches to science

Filed under: China, History, Quotations, Science — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Those of you who have studied physics know that the laws of motion are usually introduced through the mechanics and dynamics of point particles, or of simple objects acting under the influence of discrete and coherent forces. The reason for this is straightforward: even a tiny bit more complexity, and the system’s behaviour quickly dissolves into a morass that’s analytically intractable and computationally infeasible. The fact that the mutual gravitational influences of just three celestial objects results in chaotic dynamics has entered into popular culture as the “three-body problem”. But even a simple double-pendulum is impossible to predict, even with all kinds of simplifying assumptions (massless rods, no friction, no air resistance, etc., etc.).

It’s not just physics. The central technique of modern science is that of boiling something down to its absolute simplest form, understanding the simplest non-trivial case as thoroughly as possible, and only then building back up to more familiar situations. In physics we start with contrived gedankenexperimenten: “what if two particles collided in a vacuum”, and build experimental apparatuses designed to mimic these ultra-simple cases. In economics we imagine markets with a single buyer and a single seller, both perfectly rational. In political philosophy we imagine human beings in a state of nature, or societies established by a primitive contract. In biology we try to understand the functions of organisms, organs, or other systems by recursively taking them apart and trying to figure out each part in isolation. In every case, what we’re engaging in is “analysis”, ἀνά-λυσις, literally a “thorough unravelling”, understanding the whole by first understanding its parts.

This approach is totally alien to the traditional Chinese understanding of reality, which held instead that no part of the world could be understood except in its relation to the rest of the universe. You can see this in the domains of science where they did maintain a lead. Is it really a coincidence that the Medieval Chinese got frighteningly far with the mathematics of wave mechanics? Or quickly deduced the causes of the tides? Or made great strides with magnetism? In each of these cases, the physical phenomenon in question was compatible with an “organicist conception in which every phenomenon was connected with every other according to a hierarchical order”. Indeed, in all of these cases real understanding was aided by the assumption that a universal harmony underlay all things and connected all things. The tides really are in harmony with the moon, and the lodestone with the earth.

This science, founded on holism rather than on analysis, made great strides in some fields but fell behind in others. It readily imbibed action at a distance, but it could not and would not tolerate the theory of atoms. In this way it serves as a strange mirror of Medieval European science, which also loved the theory of correspondences, also loved alchemy and disdained analysis. The difference is that the glorious intellectual synthesis of Neo-Confucianism was never seriously challenged, it survived the Mongol conquest, it survived the desolation of the civil wars that preceded the Ming founding, it survived everything until communism. In contrast, the eerily-similar Thomistic metaphysics of the High Middle Ages was broken apart by the Reformation, and sufficiently discredited that analytical methods could take their first tentative steps.

This is, to be clear, my own crazy theory, because Needham never really gave a solution to his own puzzle. I came up with it only as a sort of thought-experiment, because I wanted to see if I could find a solution to Needham’s puzzle that disdained material explanations in favour of intellectual tendencies, because I find such theories curiously underrated in our culture. I only half-believe this theory,1 but I find it interesting because twentieth-century Western science has in some ways come back around to the holistic view of things: from Lagrangian methods in theoretical physics, to category theory in mathematics, to systems biology and ecology. It wouldn’t be the first time that a way of viewing the world useful to one age became an impediment to reaching the next one. The question is: what are we missing today?

John Psmith, “REVIEW: Science in Traditional China, by Joseph Needham”, Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf, 2023-08-14.


  1. The thing about material conditions is they usually are dispositive!

April 15, 2026

The Korean War Week 95: TWO THIRDS of POWs Refuse Repatriation – April 14, 1952

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

The Korean War by Indy Neidell
Published 14 Apr 2026

US Marines begin to make contact with their Communist Chinese adversaries in their new position in the west of Korea, but a more insidious issue is beginning to threaten the UN war effort: dwindling stockpiles of ammunition. In fact, two-thirds of the US army’s procurement budget is going exclusively to ammunition, but production lag — the time between paying for something and actually getting it — is putting Eighth Army operations at risk. Elsewhere, POW screening begins, with results that might throw a wrench into the painstakingly negotiated armistice terms back at Panmunjom.

00:00 Hook
00:59 Recap
01:51 POW Screening
05:49 Ammunition
10:46 Marine Operations
14:07 Summary
14:57 Conclusion
(more…)

April 8, 2026

The Korean War Week 94: Mines, Marines, and Mayhem – April 7, 1952

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

The Korean War by Indy Neidell
Published 7 Apr 2026

In order to try and make some progress on the thorny issue of POW repatriation, the UN offers to screen all the POWs they hold to get an exact number of who refuses to be sent back. The Communists agree and the plans are put in motion. Plans in the field are finishing up, with the US 1st Marine Division having moved to new positions in the west, but they now have to deal with the unforeseen issue of thousands of landmines. They did not see that coming.

00:00 Intro
00:47 Recap
01:27 POW Issues
05:58 New Operations
07:18 Marine Defenses
10:53 Landmines
14:18 Summary
15:01 Conclusion

April 7, 2026

The Myth of Mooncakes: Did they topple a Chinese Dynasty?

Filed under: China, Food, History — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Tasting History with Max Miller
Published 30 Sept 2025

Mooncakes made with flaky pastry and a seed and nut filling, decorated with a red stamp

City/Region: China
Time Period: 1792

There are many different kinds of mooncakes made all over East Asia around this time of year for the Mid-Autumn Festival. Some are savory, some are sweet, and they can have chewy, crumbly, or flaky doughs.

The flaky dough that we’re making here can be made with either lard or melted butter. Lard would have been more traditional for 1792, and it makes a more flavorful pastry, but melted butter will make a smoother dough that’s easier to work with and comes out less crumbly and more flaky.

The filling is delicious and not too sweet, with a rich unctuousness from lard, nuts, and seeds.

    Imperial Scholar Liu’s Mooncake
    Use flying flour from Shandong to make a flaky pastry for the crust, with pine nuts, walnuts, and melon seeds ground into a fine powder for the filling. A little rock sugar and lard are added. When eaten, it does not taste overly sweet, but instead is fragrant, flaky yet tender, and rich; a truly unique experience.
    Suiyuan Shidan by Yuan Mei, 1792

(more…)

April 5, 2026

When military requirements conflict with national policies

On Substack, Holly MathNerd explains why the US military hasn’t ramped up production of drones in light of the experiences of other current conflicts:

Most people who have opinions about the war in Iran are not also reading the Federal Acquisition Regulations. I am, unfortunately for my social life, one of the people who does both.

And when you hold those two things in your head at the same time — what’s happening over the Strait of Hormuz and what’s happening in federal procurement policy — a contradiction emerges that is so glaring, and so consequential, that I could not write about anything else this week.

Here is the contradiction, in full, before I show you the data.

The United States is fighting a war where drones are the decisive tactical weapon. We are spending $2 to $4 million per intercept to stop Iranian drones that cost $50,000 each. Our own offensive drone program shipped what it had into an active war because full-rate production hadn’t started yet. Ukraine, which does not have this problem, produced two million drones in 2024 by building a distributed ecosystem of small manufacturers who iterate their designs every two weeks and sell units for $300 to $5,000 each.

We cannot do what Ukraine does, because Congress — correctly, for legitimate national security reasons — spent five consecutive National Defense Authorization Acts closing the door on Chinese drone hardware. DJI, the dominant global manufacturer, is now restricted by four separate federal authorities. There is no waiver for convenience. The wall is complete.

Which means the only path to drone dominance runs through a domestic industrial base capable of producing drones at volume, at low cost, with rapid iteration.

That base exists. Partially. Precariously. And it is built on exactly the kind of small, specialized, distributed manufacturers that the 8(a) federal contracting program was designed to bring into the market.

April 3, 2026

Eight years of Canadian government “international assistance” spending

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

On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, The Reclamare has a thread on examining what the Canadian federal government has been supporting through Global Affairs:

Biggie here – I took 8 years of Global Affairs spending, and made searchable databases🧵

It details
$61 billion spending
218,000 records
6,600 recipients around the world
https://thereclamare.github.io

You can search by;
– Year
– Spending Destination (country where money is spent)
– Recipient
– Purpose
– Amount
– Continent

Govt data files will show a recipient as Simon Fraser University in BC

However, if SFU is spending the money on a project in China, its actually money destined for China

There is 1,192 spending records of our taxes being spent in China, totalling $93 million dollars

One of the largest entrees is Refugee spending, but its a bit dishonest

Global Affairs details all its spending on Refugees, except they are inside Canada

In 8 years there has been $6.4 billion tax dollars spent on refugees inside Canada, but shown as foreign affairs spending

You can search for specific organizations to see how Canada is helping fund terrorist connected organizations like UNRWA

A quick look shows $211 million in tax dollars given to UNRWA, to be spent in places like Syria for reason like Gender equality🤪

Government lists many programs under Gender Equality

You can search for those too – in 8 years Canada gave away $35 billion tax dollars to foreign countries around the world under the guise of “Gender”

This is for your interest and knowledge but also for the searchers and journos out there, who like me, can’t make heads or tails of published government data

Please have a look and share what you find:)
https://thereclamare.github.io

/fin

April 1, 2026

The Korean War Week 93: Who Wants To Be President? – March 31, 1952

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

The Korean War by Indy Neidell
Published 31 Mar 2026

A surprise announcement this week leaves the US wondering just who is going to run for President — the election is this fall. Whoever does run and win, it can’t help but have an impact on this war. As for what’s going on in the war, Operation Mixmaster winds up, having moved the US 1st Marine Division far to the west along the front lines. The operation was a success, but there are a host of new dangers to deal with in the new defenses. Operation Saturate goes into action- this is another aerial interdiction campaign against Communist logistics, but early results are disappointing, and the future composition of the South Korean armed forces because more and more an issue of contention.

00:00 Intro
00:46 Recap
01:14 Truman Won’t Run
07:04 Operation Mixmaster
11:04 Operation Saturate
13:17 Increase the ROK
16:32 Summary
16:46 Conclusion
(more…)

March 31, 2026

QotD: Slavery

Filed under: China, History, Law, Quotations, Russia — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

As sociologist Orlando Patterson (b.1940) has observed:

    It is impolite to say of one’s spouse or one’s debtor that they are part of one’s property. With slaves, politeness is unnecessary. (Slavery and Social Death, P.22)

What makes a slave different from a wife, professional player or even a serf is that a slave is in a state of social death: they have no claims of social connection that their master (or anyone else) need pay attention to beyond that to the master.

This is not to say slaves have no legal personality — all slave systems are very well aware that slaves are people. Rather, the relationship of exclusive domination was such that they had no connections that anyone had any obligation to respect other than to their master.

Other individuals might be in relationships of servitude under a master but still retained connections with others subject to presumptive respect. This was true even of serfs and is what distinguishes various forms of serfdom from slavery. Even under Russian serfdom, a serf marriage was a legally recognised marriage; a serf father had legally recognised authority over his family; a serf could legally own property. Once somebody had suffered the social death of slavery, they were utterly bereft of any such connections.

Both serf and slave lacked any choice of master or about the nature and content of that mastery: that is what makes both forms of labour bondage. Nevertheless, a serf had legally recognised relationships, and choices about them, that a slave simply did not.

Slaves are violently dominated: the whip or equivalent has been a control device in every known system of slavery. They are natally alienated: both from from any (positive) standing from their ancestors or claims over their descendants. They are culturally degraded: whether in naming, clothing, hair style, marks on the body or required acts.

All this serves to establish, mark and reinforce the relationship of domination. For that level of domination is required to turn one human into the possession, and so the property, of another. (Karl Marx’s talk of “wage slave” is not only rhetorical excess, it is contemptible rhetorical excess: a manifestation of his comprehensive mischaracterisation of commerce.)

None of these key features of domination require the acknowledgement of the wider society. There are likely slaves in every major city in the world, even in economically highly developed democracies with the rule of law.

While it can be helpful to have your relationship of domination over a slave recognised by others, the crucial thing is the acknowledgment by the slave. Slavery is a relationship between people about an owned thing, where the slave acknowledges that they are the owned thing. This is a key element in the humiliation of slavery.

The mechanisms of domination are, however, obviously much more powerful if they are embedded in wider institutional acceptance of slavery. Where there is no such wider acknowledgement, then even greater isolation from the wider society is required to establish and maintain the relationship of domination.

In social systems that openly incorporate slaveholding, a slave’s state of domination, of the social nullity of no independent connection, normally meant that they could not be a formally recognised owner of property: that they could not be a legal owner of property, not a person who could have property. They lacked the sort of legal standing that could legally own things.

To do so would require the slave to have social and legal connections, beyond the claims and decisions of their master, that others are bound to accept or respect, and that is precisely what slavery, as a structure of domination of one by other, denies. The Ahaggar Tuaregs express this feature of slavery very directly, holding that:

    without the master the slave does not exist, and he is only socializable through his master. (Slavery and Social Death, P.4.)

Slavery is, always and everywhere, a created relationship of dominion. As the Kel Gress group of the Tuareg say:

    All persons are created by God, the slave is created by the Tuareg. (Slavery and Social Death, P.4)

In a society that accepts slavery, the conventions of acknowledged possession will operate for the master about the slave in a far more complete way than any other claim of property in another human. If other mechanisms of delegated control were sufficiently absent or attenuated, then slaves became preferred agents. The use of slaves as commercial agents was surprisingly common.

In societies dominated by kin-groups, slaves could make preferred warriors or officials precisely because they had no other connection entitled to presumptive respect than that to their master — hence the slave warriors of Greater Middle Eastern (Morocco to Pakistan) Islam.

The danger of kin-groups is that they readily colonise social institutions — rulers come and go, the kin-group is forever. Slave warriors and officials were a solution to that problem in societies where suppression of kin-groups was not a practicable option.

Imperial China found kin-groups useful for economising on administrative costs and Emperors used distance — officials could not be assigned to their home counties — and rotation of officials to inhibit kin-group colonisation of their administrations. Even so, much of the appeal of eunuchs to Emperors was precisely the presumed severing of kin-group ties. (They also had the advantage of being the only males, other than the Emperor, permitted overnight residence in the imperial palace.)

Nevertheless, slavery can exist without such wider acknowledgement by laws. For turning someone into a slave requires forcing them to acknowledge the relationship of domination to the point of being a possession of another.

So, slavery is not, at its core, a matter of property but of domination. Domination to the extent that the conventions of acknowledged possession can apply to slaves entire. Slaves can be turned into property without any other connections with presumptive respect or standing. Yet, even a slave could be a beneficial participant in the conventions of acknowledged possession.

For, so powerfully useful are the conventions of acknowledged possession, that masters have, surprisingly often, allowed slaves to also be accepted beneficiaries of the conventions of acknowledged possession. To be owners of property in practice, if not in law. This was done to lessen the burdens of control, the cost of subsistence or to enable the slave to buy their freedom. The Romans acknowledged this through the concept of peculium.

The Romans, being relentlessly logical in such matters, held a slave to be an owned animal. That is, a human on which such a comprehensive social death has been imposed that they are the legal equivalent of a domesticated animal. (Yet, somewhat awkwardly, still people.)

Just as you can geld an animal, you can castrate a slave. Despite the Islamic slave trade being on a comparable scale to, and lasting centuries longer than, the Transatlantic slave trade, there is no ex-slave diaspora within Islam, unlike the Americas. All children of a Muslim father are members of the Muslim community while so many of the male slaves were castrated.

The Roman concept of property as dominium, as absolute ownership of a thing, may have transferred the domination of slavery into a more general conception of property so as to absolutely separate slave (who suffers dominium) from citizen (who possesses it). Rome ran one of the most open slave systems in human history, such that a freed slave could become a citizen. This necessitated particularly sharp legal delineation of the difference between slave and citizen.

Such dominion is not a relationship between a person and thing (despite claims to the contrary) for it is still setting up a relationship with others regarding what is owned, remembering that the crucial thing in property is not mine! but yours!: the acknowledgement by others of possession and so the right-to-decide. Hence the importance of the signals of possession for slavery.

The Greeks also had citizenship and — particularly in the case of Athens — mass slavery. Greek citizenship was, however, far more exclusive than Roman citizenship and the existence of metis, resident non-citizens, further separated citizen from slave. The Greek city-states also operated much more convention-based, and distinctly less developed, laws than did Rome. If law is a matter of such abstraction as is needed to establish functional differences, and no more, the Romans perhaps felt more need to establish that a citizen could possess dominion.

Conversely, as Romans were not moral universalists, they felt no need to generate some justificatory abstraction about slavery: a slave was simply a loser. If a slave later became a Roman citizen, then, congratulations to them, they had become a winner (and few cultures have worshipped success quite as relentlessly as did the Romans). Hence freedmen would put their status as freedman on their tombstones.

Aristotle — as his moral theory did tend towards moral universalism — came up with a clumsy justificatory abstraction (natural slaves) as to why slaves could be morally degraded. Indeed, the combination of moral universalism and slavery invariably led to justifications that held some essential flaw in the slave justified their domination by others. A process much easier to manage if slaves were from a different continental region, so with distinguishing physical markers of their continental origin.

The Romans had no need of such Just-So stories to justify slavery and did not generate them. Muslims and Christians are moral universalists and so did manifest the need to tell such Just-So stories about enslaved groups: why children of God were being enslaved. (Because that is what they were fit for, clearly.)

Islamic writers generated the first major discourses of skin-colour racism, applying them to the populations they enslaved. In their case, generating both anti-black and anti-white racism, as they systematically enslaved both Sub-Saharan Africans and Europeans, particularly Eastern Europeans. It also led to some awkward rationalisations as to why the inhabitants of South Asia could have dark skins but not suffer from any deemed inherent inferiority.

Just as slavery continues, modern totalitarian Party-States have used forced labour — labour bondage — on massive scales, starting with the Soviet Union and then wartime Nazi Germany. Such continues to the present day in CCP China — infamously of the Uyghurs — and the Kim Family Regime of North Korea. From 1940 to 1956, the Soviet Union banned workers moving jobs without the permission of their existing workforce, the key element of serfdom.

Lorenzo Warby, “Owning people, owning animals, controlling attributes”, Lorenzo from Oz, 2025-12-25.

March 25, 2026

The Korean War Week 92: Operation Mixmaster! – March 24, 1952

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

The Korean War by Indy Neidell
Published 24 Mar 2026

The UN forces begin a huge operation to move the US 1st Marine Division to new defensive positions far to the west of the former ones, but this involves moving some 200,000 men back and forth along the lines. Behind the lines, the ROK continues building up force trying to turn itself into a well equipped and trained modern army, and above the lines the tech war marches on as the UN premieres a new night fighter.

00:55 Recap
01:40 The ROK Economy
06:40 Operation Mixmaster
07:39 Rotation Settled
10:31 Ridgway’s Recommendations
14:01 Overt or Covert POW Screening
15:54 Notes
16:22 Summary
16:34 Conclusion
(more…)

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