World War Two
Published 23 Apr 2022The mastermind of Pearl Harbor meets his fate this week in the Solomons, as do a great many Italian airmen and sailors in the Mediterranean in the Palm Sunday Massacre trying to supply the desperate Axis forces in Tunisia.
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April 24, 2022
Ladies and Gentlemen, We Got Him – Yamamoto – WW2 – 191 – April 23, 1943
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April 21, 2022
QotD: Self-promotion in the modern job market
Self-promotion is not new, but never before has it been what theology was in the Middle Ages, the queen of the sciences.
A friend of mine, an Indian pediatrician, applied for temporary jobs in England and was considered for none of them. My friend was puzzled by this, for he had worked in England before and had good references. My wife, who knew the system from having worked in it at a senior level, asked to see his curriculum vitae that he sent to prospective employers, and soon spotted the problem: He boasted of nothing, and the culture had changed. What was necessary, my wife said, was to inflate his accomplishments as boastfully as possible. There was no risk that anyone would discover his exaggerations. He had once worked as a voluntary pediatric consultant to Mother Teresa’s charity in Calcutta; he had not even mentioned it in his CV, let alone made it sound as if he were all but the founder of her charity. If he once had helped an old lady across the road with her shopping, he should transmute this in his CV into a lifelong concern for the condition of the elderly; and so on and so forth.
It was all rather disgusting, but it worked like a charm: He immediately had offers of jobs aplenty, though of course his real worth as a doctor remained precisely the same. Reticence, which is to me a far more attractive quality than boastfulness, will get you nowhere, and nothing must be left to speak for itself. You must blow your own trumpet, if possible louder than anyone else’s.
Nowadays there are professional coaches in how to “big yourself up”, as the charming phrase has it, in applications for jobs or places in institutions. The son of a friend of mine used one to get into medical school. Lying will go undetected, but even if detected will do you no lasting harm. The most minor accomplishment can and should be made to sound like evidence of genius. It is almost a condition of employment that one should boast and write an advertisement for oneself.
Theodore Dalrymple, “Be Your Own Advert”, Taki’s Magazine, 2022-01-13.
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April 19, 2022
Alexander’s Successors (the Diadochi): Series Introduction and Historical Context
Thersites the Historian
Published 24 Nov 2018This video introduces my series on Alexander’s Successors by talking about what the series will be like and by going through the historical context that the viewer might need to understand the age of the Successors.
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April 18, 2022
QotD: Colonialism in the British Raj
There I met a man of very advanced age, whose name I cannot remember (to my shame) who had been a civil servant in India during the final days of the Raj. He told me something I have pondered ever since. “We were just a handful of people providing guidance and administration”, he said, “with overwhelming consent in a gigantic country. We even slept in the streets during summer on khatias and had no fear of being killed.”
Whatever politics was happening was between the British and Indian political elites, and plainly did not affect most normal Britishers or Indians.
Consider, that in 1901 Indians numbered nearly 300 million while the British-born population of India was around 150,000. Colonialism was indeed by the consent of the governed, and the independence fight was primarily an intra-elite affair, where the mostly western-educated native would-be boss class fought with the foreign overlords who taught them, for political control.
In the sub-continent, the civil service, lower (and some higher) judiciary, magistrates, police officers, intelligentsia, landed gentry and local businesses were primarily Indian, a lot of them pro-imperial to the end of their time. What happened to those voices? In current post-colonial discourse, one cannot read any pro-imperial literature, which is either lost or considered too reactionary to be taught at universities, an injustice to a clear understanding of history.
Sumantra Maitra, “Pro-imperial truths of the old world”, The Critic, 2021-11-09.
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April 17, 2022
Kursk – The Next Great Battle? – WW2 – 190 – April 16, 1943
World War Two
Published 16 Apr 2022The Allies have one chance left to catch the Axis forces in Tunisia before they can reach the Tunis defences; in the USSR both the Axis and Soviets are making plans for a fight near Kursk; and in the skies, in the South Pacific a Japanese aerial offensive ends and Yamamoto himself flies off to congratulate his pilots.
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April 15, 2022
The West Sacrifices Poland to the Soviets – WAH 056 – April 1943, Pt.1
World War Two
Published 14 Apr 2022There are cracks in the alliances on both sides. Hitler’s allies are refusing to do his every bidding, and the revelations about the Soviet massacre of Poles in Katyn has set a wedge between Poland and the USSR.
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April 14, 2022
QotD: “… when life was simpler”
And then you get hold of primary sources on the thirties or fifties. Let’s say it’s particularly hilarious to read stuff from the right lauding that time of great freedom in either of those decades. Let’s just say that if some of the things happening back then were happening now we’d all be talking about how we were ready for revolution. (And the only reason they weren’t then is that the press was mass-media. You think it’s bad enough now, with a lying press? They had the same, but no way to check it. It was that concentration and lack of individual communication or access to the public by individuals unfiltered by the media/publishers that put us in the situation we’re in, with what is functionally the enemy of western civilization in control of the vital organs of culture. Before you get discouraged, it helps to remember, we’re only now fighting back. Continue fighting, but remember things take time. The larger a movement is, the longer it takes for it to become noticeable, much less prominent in the culture.)
And as for the left thinking that everyone before the oughts were good white Christians or whatever … Oh, sweet summer children. Let’s say when they get their freak on, with witchcraft or being naked in public, or talking about their poly relationships, or whatever the actual hell they have in their heads that day, they rarely if ever (I’ve never seen it) would have managed to shock their ancestors or ancestresses 100 years ago. Those Edwardians … well … Let’s just say they had fewer hangups. Yes, I know what the public image is. But none of them would have worried about things that the left worries about now like “differential of power” or “implied patriarchy” which meant they were much freer to do whatever crossed their heads at the moment. Of course they also thought they would have shocked their ancestors. And I bet you they wouldn’t.
At some point, if you have a chance, read a book called Our Bones Are Scattered about the Indian revolt in Victorian times. I only read it once because it’s a deeply disturbing book, one of those clashes of civilization where you feel sorry for both sides. But it is very well written, and the beginning of the book is … revealing. The British commander was … well … sort of married to a woman who had been sort of married something like six times before and who went from man to man, collecting kids along the way. Notwithstanding which, they were Victorian nobility and had a bunch of kids of their own and …
Let’s just say Victorians aren’t the way we’ve learned to think of them either. In fact you can be sure pretty much no one ever was. People kept and keep the front they need to, but behind the scenes things were always messy and complicated.
Which often makes finding our own way in this messy and complicated way very difficult.
Sarah Hoyt, “Finding Your Way”, According to Hoyt, 2019-02-18.
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April 12, 2022
Last War Patrol of HMS Terrapin
The History Guy: History Deserves to be Remembered
Published April 11, 2022On her seventh war patrol, in the south Java Sea, the T class British submarine HMS Terrapin and her crew had faced the terror of battle and barely survived. Badly damaged and far from home, sometimes the drama of war is not just in the battle, but in the voyage home.
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April 10, 2022
Mussolini is Tired of War – WW2 – 189 – April 9th , 1943
World War Two
Published 9 Apr 2022Adolf Hitler meets with Benito Mussolini to hopefully restore his flagging morale and convince him that the Axis can hold out in North Africa, but the situation there grows more precarious and this week there the Allies advancing from the west and the east link up for the first time. The Axis are also holding out in the Caucasus, as new Soviet attacks to take Krymskaya begin.
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April 9, 2022
Bicycle – Can You Put a Gun on It? – WW2 Special
World War Two
Published 8 Apr 2022“Bicycling to victory! Soldiers were moved by trucks and trains to the front, transported on the backs of tanks and armoured vehicles into combat. But sometimes they also went by using the good old bicycle. Pedaling over the paved roads of Western Europe and East Asia, specialised bicycle-companies surprised through mobility and independence. Bikes were comparatively cheap to mass produce and did not need fuel nor fodder. So they proved a real alternative to those nations that had to budget their oil resources.”
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It wasn’t the Wuhan Coronavirus that crippled the world economy — it was government reaction to the pandemic
Dan Sanchez points out the undeniable truth that most of the economic damage we’ve sustained over the last two years wasn’t due to the pandemic itself, but to the incredibly disruptive public health measures almost every western government implemented in response (with huge connivance on the part of the legacy media and the social media companies):
… it will not be the coronavirus making us poorer, but the fallacy, embraced by officials from Beijing to DC, that central planners can manage society-wide problems, like “healing” a global pandemic or “fixing” a global supply chain.
As the great economists Ludwig von Mises and F.A. Hayek explained, societies and economies are inconceivably complex, and it is literally impossible for anyone to centrally plan something so far beyond their comprehension. To think otherwise is, as Hayek called it, a “fatal conceit”.
The fatal conceit of central planners is manifest in the very term “global supply chain”. The metaphor of a “chain” portrays the economy as something static and linear: something simple enough for a single mind to “fix”.
But, as Leonard Read vividly showed in his classic essay “I, Pencil”, even a seemingly simple good like a pencil is not the product of a single supply chain. Every good in the economy is descended from a vast “family tree” of innumerable factors of production. And all the family trees of all goods are intricately interconnected, making the economy, not a “chain”, but as economist Murray Rothbard depicted it, “a highly complex, interacting latticework of exchanges”.
This vast, dynamic latticework is self-healing and self-fixing: through the actions and interactions of its constituent individuals. Blundering, arrogant central planners only get in the way and make things worse.
That has been the lesson of free-market economists and social theorists going back to Adam Smith. The western world partly embraced that lesson, and it flourished as a result, becoming a beacon to the world. Starting in the 1970s, even Communist China emulated its example, opening up its markets. This was a humanitarian miracle for the Chinese people and a boon for us all. If not for Chinese manufacturing being integrated into the global division of labor, it is hard to imagine the west having the modern high-tech living standards and super-comfortable working conditions we enjoy (however precariously) today.
Whereas once China liberalized in emulation of the west, now the leaders of the “free world” are emulating (and, in the case of Canada’s prime minister, openly admiring) the authoritarianism of the CCP. As crises continue to mount, it is clear that this turn toward tyranny is putting our future at risk.
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QotD: Temporary tattoos and cultural literacy
I was once at an art fair where there was a booth selling temporary tattoos. One of the tattoos was a Chinese character that was translated on the tattoo’s plastic label as “bitch”, an appealing bit of body art for the tough girls among us, I suppose. Except a far more straightforward and accurate translation of the character would be “prostitute”, or maybe “whore”.
Teaching students who fell in love with “Eastern philosophy” via our culture’s myriad Mr Miyagis is like being the one to tell someone her tattoo says “whore”. The tattooed will be better off knowing, but she won’t thank you for telling her. Pop-culture-induced orientalism usually does wash off, but the cleanup is far less alluring than wearing the myth. At least, I console myself, Kondo’s target market is the middle-aged, so maybe my young college students won’t show up with this particular “tattoo”.
Amy Olberding, “Tidying up is not joyful but another misuse of Eastern ideas”, Aeon, 2019-02-18.
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April 8, 2022
The structure of the Chinese government
Scott Alexander reviews The Third Revolution, by Elizabeth Economy, although as he says up front, “It’s a look through recent Chinese history, with The Third Revolution as a very loose inspiration.”:
How Does China’s Government Work?
The traditional answer is a flowchart like this one (source):
But you could give a similarly convoluted flowchart for America, and it would tell people much less than words like “democracy” or “balance of powers”. What’s the Chinese equivalent?
I found it a little more helpful to see it diagrammed it as a series of nested squares:
The inner levels have real power, and the outer layers are theoretically overseers but actually rubber stamps. Things get more and more rubber-stampy as you go out, culminating in the National People’s Congress, which recently voted to re-elect Xi by a vote of 2,970 in favor, 0 against — it’s so irrelevant that it’s literally called “the NPC”.
Who chooses the members of the inner groups? In theory, the outer groups; for example, the Central Committee is supposed to elect the Politburo Standing Committee. In practice, these selections tend to be of the “2,970 in favor, 0 against” variety, so they must be taking marching orders from someone. Who? The Chinese government doesn’t talk about it much, but probably the members of the Politburo Standing Committee hand-pick everyone, including the Paramount Leader and their own successors.
How do they pick? Mostly patron-client relationships. Every leading politician cultivates a network of loyal supporters; if he takes power, he tries to put as many of his people into top posts as he can. The seven Politburo members wheel and deal with each other about whose clients should get which positions, including any unoccupied Politburo seats.
If the two word description of US politics is “democracy, checks-and-balances”, then the two word description of Chinese politics is “oligarchy, patrons-and-clients”. If this seems exotic, it shouldn’t: it’s not much different from how the US fills unelected posts like “ambassador” and “White House staffer”. The Trump presidency put this into especially sharp relief, either because Trump did it more blatantly than usual or just because Trump’s clients were so obviously different from the normal Washington crowd. Consider eg the appointment of Jeff Sessions (among the first Congressmen to endorse Trump) as Attorney General.
In the US, this is a peripheral part of the system, checked by democracy. In China, it’s the whole game.
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Chinese C96 “Wauser” Broomhandle
Forgotten Weapons
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The C96 Mauser was a very popular handgun in China in the 1920s and 30s, which naturally led to a substantial number of domestically-produced copies of it. These ran the full range of quality, from dangerous to excellent. This particular example falls into the middle, appearing to be a pretty fair mechanical copy of the C96 action. However, it does exhibit classic Chinese misspelled markings — the workers who made these guns often did not actually read English (or German), and made best-guess attempts at copying the markings on authentic firearms. The result was sometimes something like the Wauser.
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April 7, 2022
QotD: The KonMari message without Marie Kondo
In more fanciful moments, I think about decluttering the KonMari method itself, stripping it of the middle-class respectability its exoticism confers. In place of Kondo herself, I imagine a tired maid (maids are always tired) using her years of “tidying” to counsel a family on managing their too-abundant stuff. She appeals to her experience both in cleaning and in life – invoking, say, that time she had to downsize from a double-wide trailer to a single-wide. (Long before the “tiny house movement” – another pop-culture fascination for those suffocated by their own stuff – many people already lived in tiny homes, and these are called trailers.) My sage maid uses her organisational competency, hard-earned from years of picking up after others, and her long practice in the art of making do without the new or the shiny. Most of all, she is full of plain good sense. But what she will not promise, cannot promise, is that cleaning house will bring you contentment. Nor will she suggest that you discard belongings that don’t “spark joy”. And that really is the rub.
My wise maid will forgo soft talk of joy, and use instead a harder, plain-speaking language to assess all that stuff: does it still have use in it? Most of it probably does, and what does not was probably pretty useless to begin with. After all, usefulness is not the prime criterion for many people’s buying habits. But finding that you have a house overstuffed with things useful but never used would promise its own kind of wisdom. It won’t spark joy to see it, but then the quest to find joy in all that stuff was never a good strategy to begin with. This, too, is about everything all at once.
Amy Olberding, “Tidying up is not joyful but another misuse of Eastern ideas”, Aeon, 2019-02-18.
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