Forgotten Weapons
Published 27 Dec 2025When Indonesia won its independence in 1949, its military had a real mess of different equipment. The SMLE was adopted as the first standard rifle, but these were in short supply and a lot of Arisakas and Dutch Mannlichers were also in the country’s possession. Looking for a weapon for rural police using the now-standard .303 British cartridge, the Indonesian government decided to revisit a program to convert 6.5mm M95 rifles and carbines to .303 — something initially done with Australian help in 1941.
With Australian advisors from Lithgow, the Indonesian PSM factory gear conversions in 1951, and continued them into early 1955. In total, 13,999 M95/51 conversions were made, 9,904 of them carbines and 4,905 short rifles. They were made by reboring the original 6.5mm barrels to .303 and reaming the chambers out (although this does result in a slight double shoulder to fired cases). The carbines (with 19″ barrels) were fitted with a variety of muzzle brakes, and made for an as-yet unidentified pattern of bayonet. The short rifles (with 26″ barrels) were given new 2-position rear notch sights, but left using standard Dutch M95 bayonets.
The guns were used in police and possibly military training roles until removed from service in 1961. A batch was sold as surplus in 1962 to InterArms, and another batch was found in the late 1970s and sold to Odin in the early 1980s. The InterArms guns tend to be in better condition, and have intact Indonesian markings, where the Odin guns are generally rougher and have the government property marks ground off.
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May 16, 2026
Indonesian M95/51 Mannlicher Carbine & Short Rifle Converted to .303 British
May 13, 2026
The Korean War Week 99: The War’s Most Humiliating Crisis – May 12, 1952
The Korean War by Indy Neidell
Published 12 May 2026The world turns it’s eyes to the UN POW camp at Koje-Do island when the Communist POWs in one of the compounds kidnap the Camp Commandant, an American General no less, and issue demands that they say must be met before his release. Can this be settled diplomatically, or is the army going in in force?
00:00 Intro
00:54 General Dodd Kidnapped
04:09 Koje-Do Phase Two
07:04 Dodd on Trial
13:18 The POWs Demands
18:30 Summary
19:03 Conclusion
19:54 Call to Action
May 11, 2026
“We’ve entered the pre-violence rhetorical phase of the classic communist cycle”
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 8, 2026
May 6, 2026
The Korean War Week 98: No Peace at Panmunjom – May 5, 1952
The Korean War by Indy Neidell
Published 5 May 2026At 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
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.
May 3, 2026
Useful intellectual idiot case study: Malcolm Caldwell
Occasionally, Substack suggests a writer or a particular post that its algorithm deems likely to be of interest to me. This post from a few weeks ago by Mark Manson definitely fit the bill. He ranges over a variety of cases starring intellectuals suddenly discovering reality, starting with a particular British useful idiot’s collision with reality:
On December 19th, 1978, Malcolm Caldwell, a professor at the University of London boarded a plane to Cambodia for a historic trip. It was an opportunity so rare, so special, that Caldwell genuinely believed it could potentially change the world.
Three days later, Caldwell would die in one of the dumbest ways imaginable.
Malcolm Caldwell was the consummate intellectual. He had spent his entire life studying Southeast Asian history and economic development. He had written hundreds of articles and over a dozen books on the subject. He was a professor and researcher at one of the most prestigious universities in the world and was celebrated and supported for his views.
Much of his work dealt with English colonialism in Asia and its dire political consequences. As a result, Caldwell evolved into a staunch Marxist, far to the left of the leftiest leftist who ever lefted.
Just to give you an idea how far left we’re talking, Caldwell visited North Korea in the 1960s and came away saying good things about it. When the Vietnam War started, Caldwell tried to host a fundraiser in London … for the Vietcong.
So when communist revolutionaries took control of Cambodia, Caldwell showed enthusiastic support. The new communist leader of Cambodia was a man by the name of Pol Pot and he had radical new ideas of how to achieve a communist utopia — ideas that had existed in Marxist thought but had yet to actually be attempted in any communist country. Caldwell had been waiting for decades for a communist revolutionary who fully implemented his Marxist dreams. Caldwell came to believe Pol Pot was his man.
Bones recovered from the Killing Fields in Cambodia. Pol Pot’s regime killed nearly 2 million people in less than five years.
Image from Mark Manson.But the truth was that Pol Pot was as insane as he was cruel. And it was pretty obvious to anyone paying attention. Upon taking power, Pol Pot nationalized the all land, kicked out or killed all foreigners, and began a sweeping genocide against the educated class. In the four years Pol Pot was in power, it’s estimated that he was responsible for the death of more than 20% of the country’s population.
But when news of the genocide and atrocities began to leak out of Cambodia, Caldwell refused to believe it. He defended Pol Pot’s regime and wrote off the atrocities as simply more western capitalist propaganda. His unwavering support eventually earned him an exclusive invitation to visit Cambodia by Pol Pot’s government. Caldwell accepted. And in December of 1978, he boarded that fateful flight to Asia.
Once there, Caldwell toured the country. He met the leadership and learned about their policies firsthand. But the climax of his trip was the last evening — a private audience with Pol Pot himself. Reportedly, Caldwell was “euphoric” with excitement and anticipation. Once in private, Caldwell and Pol Pot had a long intellectual conversation. In his enthusiasm, Caldwell began sharing some of his ideas for the Cambodian regime. He began to offer feedback and dare I say, potentially even a little criticism. Pol Pot, not used to being lectured to by a professor, promptly had Caldwell killed that night.
Malcolm Caldwell is what I like to refer to as an intelligent idiot. A man with an encyclopedic breadth of knowledge and understanding, a world-class mind with powerful thoughts, and yet absolutely no idea how to apply any of it.
April 30, 2026
China’s weaker-than-it-seems strategic position
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
The Korean War by Indy Neidell
Published 28 Apr 2026There 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 26, 2026
South Korea’s switch from an exporting heavyweight to a cultural juggernaut
In the latest SHuSH newsletter, Kenneth Whyte looks at the importance of a South Korean government report to changing the structure of the South Korean economy and making the country far more visible culturally on the world stage:
South Korea, in the latter half of the twentieth century, was building its economy almost entirely by exporting manufactured goods, everything from home electronics to ships to automobiles. That changed, as the story goes, when the country’s Presidential Advisory Board on Science and Technology released a report on digital technology in May 1994. It noted that a single Hollywood film, Jurassic Park, with its computer-generated dinosaurs, generated the same amount of foreign sales as 1.5 million Hyundai cars. The darling of Korean industry, Hyundai was exporting 640,000 cars a year in 1994. So one film was worth more than two years of heavy industrial production requiring enormous plant, equipment, capital investment.
The report stunned Koreans — “literally sent shock waves across the country”, writes Doobo Shim, a Seoul-based professor of media and communication. At the time, culture and entertainment were viewed as ephemeral and unlikely to contribute to Korea’s core mission of “improving the material conditions of the people”. The country decided it needed to change its game in order to thrive in the twenty-first century economy.
It wasn’t a straight line from the Presidential Advisory Report to Parasite, Squid Game, BTS, Blackpink, and Han Kang’s Nobel prize, but it’s straighter than you might think. Seoul is now a top-five world cultural center, and arguably top two if we’re talking pop culture and anything that appeals to under-thirties. How it happened tells us a great deal about Canada’s relative failure to develop home-grown cultural and entertainment industries.
The Presidential Advisory Board report alone did not alter Korea’s strategy. The country was starting from way behind. First came democratic reforms and media deregulation. That birthed new commercial TV channels and a variety of independent publications. Now with an independent (from government) domestic media sector, Korea tried to protect it by limiting the amount of foreign cultural product in its market. That didn’t work. In 1993, 90 of the top 100 video rentals in the country were from Hollywood; only five were domestic. Sound familiar, Canada?
Protection wasn’t going to work, anyway. Another factor at play was the Uruguay Round, an international accord negotiated between 1986-1994 that decisively liberalized the global economy, forcing all 123 signatory countries to open their markets for a vast range of goods and services, including communications services and entertainment product. It was clear to Korea that efforts to protect heritage and culture by shutting out the world had no future. It needed to upgrade its efforts in the cultural sphere if it wanted to avoid being swamped by content from multinational companies, and not just American ones. Satellite television services out of Japan and Hong Kong were already making inroads in Korea.
Another thing: Korea had noticed that Japan, its nearest rival in the home electronics sector, was making investments in content. Sony had bought Columbia pictures and CBS records. It was the nineties, the age of synergy, or vertical integration. Companies making devices — video players, portable music players — also wanted to own what played on them. Korean firms such as Samsung and Daewoo, makers of TVs and VCRs, felt a need to be vertically integrated, too.
So the Presidential Advisory Report landed on fertile ground. Korean businesses felt an imperative to pay attention to content. The Korean government felt itself under siege from foreign cultural and entertainment product. “Gone are the days”, said one expert interviewed in the newspaper Dong-A Ilbo, “when the government could appeal to the people to watch only Korean programs out of patriotism”.
All that notwithstanding, the report mostly resonated because it presented culture as an opportunity. It asked Koreans to recognize the potential of arts and entertainment to improve the material conditions of the people. Instead of resisting the emerging global marketplace, the power of multinational corporations and platforms, and the free movement of talent, it needed to master this new system, compete commercially, and take Korean culture to the world.
April 22, 2026
The Korean War Week 96: Korean Marines Leapfrog the Han – April 21, 1952
The Korean War by Indy Neidell
Published 21 Apr 2026UN 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
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.
- 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
The Korean War by Indy Neidell
Published 14 Apr 2026US 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
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April 8, 2026
The Korean War Week 94: Mines, Marines, and Mayhem – April 7, 1952
The Korean War by Indy Neidell
Published 7 Apr 2026In 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
QotD: Without You, There is No Us, by Suki Kim
Without You, There is No Us, by Suki Kim. Aka A Portrait of the Basic College Girl as a Young Woman. Be advised: Be current on your blood pressure meds before you check this one out from the library. Maybe have one of those defibrillator kits on hand, because it’ll get your blood boiling like no other. Kim scams an American missionary organization into sending her to North Korea as an English teacher. She’s well aware that the organization will be destroyed when she’s exposed. She’s also well aware that the young boys she’s teaching — the sons of high Party officials — are going to face potentially lethal consequences, along with their entire families. None of that bothers her a bit. No, her main problem is that all those North Korean boys find Mx. Suki Kim so irresistibly sexy, OMG, she just can’t even.
Also note the passages about Her Relationship. That’s how she refers to the poor bastard. It’s something along those lines, I forget — maybe it’s “My Ex” — but either way, he never even gets the goddamn common courtesy of being referred to by name … because to Mx. Kim, he really doesn’t have one. He’s just another interchangeable character in the all-encompassing soap opera that is her life.
Severian, “Recommended Reading”, Founding Questions, 2022-06-09.







