Born into a Shia mercantile family, Jinnah left for England after high school, where he studied law and acquired a love for parliamentary procedure. Thoroughly and poshly anglicized (200 Savile Row suits were found in his closet after his death), he returned to India before the First World War, armed with a fearsome reputation as a barrister so brilliant judges tried to avoid him, and committed to Hindu-Muslim unity. His English was exquisite, but he spoke no Urdu. Completely secular, Jinnah was so indifferent to his religion — he drank and ate pork — that he planned Pakistan’s inauguration-day banquet as a luncheon, unaware it was Ramadan (they changed it to dinner).
Jinnah’s political intentions are hotly contested. According to New York Times Pakistan expert, Jane Perlez, many Pakistan researchers contend Jinnah had no interest in an Islam-dominated state, but “used the idea of Pakistan as a mere bargaining chip for Muslim majority rights within a loosely united post-colonial India.” With no autobiography or recollections from close friendships for our guidance, Jinnah remains a shadowy historical player, a political loner with an indeterminate goal beside Nehru, Gandhi and Viceroy Lord Mountbatten.
It is quite possible, for example, that Jinnah created the Muslim League and employed the rhetoric of Islam (slogan: “Islam in Danger”) and started wearing native clothes to harness religious fervour to political ambitions never fully articulated. But we can’t ever know, as a lifetime of chain smoking caught up with Jinnah, and he died before the first (bloody) year of Pakistan’s existence was out.
In Jinnah’s first speech to his newly minted country, though, we have this strong intentional clue: “You are free. You are free to go to your temples, you are free to go to your mosques or to any other place of worship in this state of Pakistan. You may belong to any religion or caste or creed — that has nothing to do with the business of the state.”
Barbara Kay, “A celebrated figure today could well be the condemned sinner of tomorrow”, National Post, 2018-06-05.
September 4, 2020
QotD: Muhammad Ali Jinnah
September 2, 2020
Cold War 2.0 — you’re soaking in it
Ted Campbell responds to a recent article in Foreign Affairs by Nadia Schadlow:
Dr Schadlow posits that “A new set of assumptions should underpin U.S. foreign policy … [and, concomitantly, the foreign polices of the US led West, including Canada’s, because] … Contrary to the optimistic predictions made in the wake of the Soviet Union’s collapse, widespread political liberalization and the growth of transnational organizations have not tempered rivalries among countries. Likewise, globalization and economic interdependence have not been unalloyed goods; often, they have generated unanticipated inequalities and vulnerabilities [and] although the proliferation of digital technologies has increased productivity and brought other benefits, it has also eroded the U.S. military’s advantages and posed challenges to democratic societies.”
After outlining the rosy assumption made by leaders and policy makers from Richard Nixon through Bill Clinton to Barack Obama ~ assumption which I shared, Nadia Schadlow says that “China had no intention of converging with the West [because] The Chinese Communist Party never intended to play by the West’s rules; it was determined to control markets rather than open them, and it did so by keeping its exchange rate artificially low, providing unfair advantages to state-owned enterprises, and erecting regulatory barriers against non-Chinese companies. Officials in both the George W. Bush and the Obama administrations worried about China’s intentions. But fundamentally, they remained convinced that the United States needed to engage with China to strengthen the rules-based international system and that China’s economic liberalization would ultimately lead to political liberalization. Instead, China has continued to take advantage of economic interdependence to grow its economy and enhance its military, thereby ensuring the long-term strength of the CCP.” Of course, from a Chinese perspective it might, very reasonably, appear that the liberal, US made (in the late 1940s) “rules based international system” was, in fact, designed to strengthen the US economy and enhance its military and ensure America’s long term strength … and that is not, many would say, a totally unreasonable view.
[…]
America’s allies, including Canada, need to step up and help the USA (and India) with the containment of both China and Russia in several regions: in Asia, Africa, the Middle East and Europe, too. Canada is a G-7 nation. It needs to start acting like one.
Australians, Brits, Canadians and Danes need not share Dr Schadlow’s Trumpian view of the world and of Cold War 2.0 to understand that:
- It is here. We are in it, like it or not; and
- Like its predecessor, it can turn hot if we do not manage it with care.
Now, at this time, the conventional wisdom is that foreign and defence policy must take a back seat to beating COVID-19 and restarting the economy. But, the Chinese and the Russians are not putting their plans on hold while they deal with the pandemic. (Maybe that’s why Justin Trudeau admires China’s “basic dictatorship” so much.) They will both be moving ahead with plans that aim to put the US-led West, including Canada, at a disadvantage. Additionally, now is a good time to announce plans to build more new warships ~ two or three large helicopter carriers, another supply ship (for a total of four) 16 major surface combatants (the new Type 26 ships) and a dozen smaller corvettes … can be and politicians should say will be built here in Canada, by Canadian workers. Defence related projects, when well conceived and directed, can be great long-term job creators. Canada can do both: speed up our recovery from the pandemic and strengthen our global position by making defence procurement a priority for the recovery.
August 31, 2020
Why was Europe better with guns? – The History of Guns
History Clarified
Published 3 Dec 2018China invented gunpowder (combustible powder), so why was it the European nations that went out and conquered the world using firearms?
This video looks at some geographical factors to examine what allowed Europe to innovate while China and most of the world fell behind with gunpowder weapons.
This focuses heavily on Kenneth Chase’s Book, Firearms: A Global History to 1700. He tries to get away from just looking at drill, organization, and state production of firearms to see how geography helped create the necessary conditions for those other innovations.
Interested in your own copy? Check out the link below:
DISCLAIMER: This video description contains affiliate links, which means that if you click on one of the product links below, I’ll receive a small commission.
The map of Japan is under Creative Commons 4.0.
August 28, 2020
National “cheater density” for popular online games
Richard Currie summarizes the findings of Ruby Fortune’s cheater research (note that there’s no data on China because reasons):
Ever torn your keyboard from the desk and flung it across the room, vowing to find the “scrub cheater” who ended your run of video-gaming success? Uh, yeah, us neither, but a study into the crooked practice might help narrow down the hypothetical search.
The research, carried out by casino games outfit Ruby Fortune, has produced a global heatmap of supposed cheater density.
According to the website, this was done by analysing “search trend and search volume data to reveal where in the world is most likely to cheat while playing online multiplayer video games”. The report looks at the frequency of search engine queries for the most-played video games and measures them against searches for related cheat codes, hacks and bots, to show which country has the highest density of cheaters, and which cheat categories are the most popular in each location.
[…]
There is a massive hole in the data, however, thanks to the Great Firewall of China, which has a terrible reputation for ruining the experience of online games.
If there was any doubt that the Middle Kingdom would otherwise take Brazil’s crown, consider that Dell once advertised a laptop for the market by saying it was especially good for running PUBG plugins to “win more at Chicken Dinner”, a reference to the “Winner winner chicken dinner” message that comes up on a victory screen.
Data from the Battle Royale granddad’s anti-cheat tech provider, BattlEye, has also suggested that at one point 99 per cent of banned cheaters were from China.
August 21, 2020
British Deserters, Sword Fights, and Poison Gas – WW2 – OOTF 016
World War Two
Published 20 Aug 2020What happened to deserters in the British Army? Did Chinese and Japanese troops ever engage in sword to sword combat? Why didn’t Germany use poison gas on the battlefield? Find out the answers to all these questions in today’s Out of the Foxholes!
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Or join The TimeGhost Army directly at: https://timeghost.tvFollow WW2 day by day on Instagram @World_war_two_realtime https://www.instagram.com/world_war_two_realtime
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Source list: http://bit.ly/WW2sourcesHosted by: Indy Neidell
Written by: Rune Væver Hartvig
Director: Astrid Deinhard
Producers: Astrid Deinhard and Spartacus Olsson
Executive Producers: Astrid Deinhard, Indy Neidell, Spartacus Olsson, Bodo Rittenauer
Creative Producer: Joram Appel
Post-Production Director: Wieke Kapteijns
Research by: Rune Væver Hartvig
Edited by: Jakub Janiec
Sound design: Marek KamińskiColorizations:
Mikołaj UchmanVisual Sources:
Imperial War Museums: HU 762498, Q 79508, El Alamein 1942, E 18542, B5114, MH 26392, F2845,
Library of Congress
Antoine from Flickr.com
National Archives NARA
Bundesarchive
Narodowe Archiwum Cyfrowe
The icons from Noun Project by: Milinda Courey, Arthur Shlain, Delwar Hossain, ahmad, Muhamad Ulum, Rooty, Simon Child, carlotta zampini, Wonmo Kang, Vectors Point, EucalypMusic:
“Break Free” – Fabien Tell
“Ancient Saga” – Max Anson
“Defeated” – Wendel SchererArchive by Screenocean/Reuters https://www.screenocean.com.
A TimeGhost chronological documentary produced by OnLion Entertainment GmbH.
August 17, 2020
Dateline Ayodhya, Uttar Pradesh, 5 August 2020
That’s a significant date, as Tom Holland explains at UnHerd:

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi performing Bhoomi Pujan at Shree Ram Janmabhoomi Mandir, in Ayodhya, Uttar Pradesh on August 05, 2020.
Photo released by the Press Information Bureau on behalf of the Prime Minister’s Office, (ID 90071) via Wikimedia Commons.
Last week, on 5 August, the Prime Minister of India laid a foundation stone and helped bury a distinctive period in global history. Narendra Modi had travelled to Ayodhya, a city long identified by Hindus with one of their most beloved gods. Lord Rama — avatar of Vishnu and hero of the Sanskrit epic, the Ramayana — was said to have ruled within its walls as the very model of those who uphold truth and justice. Like Camelot, the court of Rama glimmers tantalisingly in the imaginings of those who fall beneath its spell: the reminder of a vanished golden age, the hope that it might come again.
In recent decades, the mingled regret and yearning that the memory of Rama’s capital can inspire among Hindus had come to be focused on one particular location in the modern city of Ayodhya: the Ram Janmabhoomi, the “birthplace of Rama”. At the moment, nothing serves to mark the sacred spot. But soon enough that will change. A great complex of buildings will rise. As Modi, officially declaring the process of construction begun, put it: “A great temple will now be built for our Lord Rama.”
A fortnight earlier, the President of Turkey had celebrated a similar reconsecration. In 1453, when the Christian capital of Constantinople fell to the Ottomans, its most stupefying building, the great cathedral of Hagia Sophia, had been converted into a mosque, and duly served for almost half a millennium as a monument to the triumph of Islam over a defeated and superceded order. Then, in 1935, a decade and more after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and its replacement within its heartlands by a Turkish republic, the mosque of Ayasofya was turned into a museum. So, for decades, it remained. Then, this summer, the museum once again became a mosque. On 24 July, Hagia Sophia opened for Friday prayers. “It is breaking away from its chains of captivity,” President Erdogan declared rhapsodically. “It was the greatest dream of our youth. It was the yearning of our people and it has been accomplished.”
The synchronicity between Modi’s trip to Ayodhya and Erdogan’s to Hagia Sophia is striking, and only flimsily obscured by the fact that the Prime Minister of India is trampling the legacy of an Islamic empire much as the President of Turkey has trampled the legacy of a Christian one. In the early sixteenth century, shortly after the Moghul conquest of the lands that once, so Hindus believed, had constituted the Ram Rajya, the “realm of Rama”, a mosque was built in Ayodhya. By the twentieth century, large numbers of Hindus had come to believe that this same mosque, the Babri Masjid, stood directly on the site of the Ram Janmabhoomi. In the 1980s, the BJP — the party to which Modi belongs — began a campaign to demolish it. In 1992 a mob duly tore it down. Communal riots exploded. Thousands died.
Last November, even as the site was formally granted to Hindus, the Supreme Court of India condemned the demolition of the mosque as a crime. But a crime by whose standards? Not, it would seem, by Modi’s. Just as Erdogan justified the conversion of Hagia Sophia to a mosque by “right of conquest”, so the Prime Minister of India, hailing the opportunity to build a temple on the site where the Babri Masjid had stood, invoked the ancient traditions of his country. It was, he declared, “a unique gift from law-abiding India to truth, non-violence, faith and sacrifice.” History as well as justice stood on his side.
August 16, 2020
Surviving the surrender of Japan as allied Prisoners of War
Seventy-five years ago, the war in the Pacific had ended with the surrender of Japanese imperial forces after the atomic bombing attacks at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The war may have technically ended, but there was still plenty of danger for the surviving POWs in various camps around the Japanese home islands. George MacDonnell was a Canadian soldier who had been captured in the fall of Hong Kong early in the Japanese swathe of conquest that engulfed so many areas. He had been held as a slave labourer at a prison camp in the mountains of northern Honshu in Iwate Prefecture. In Quillette, he tells how his captivity came to an end:
It was noon on August 15th, 1945. The Japanese Emperor had just announced to his people that his country had surrendered unconditionally to the Allied Powers.
To those of us being held at Ohashi Prison Camp in the mountains of northern Japan, where we’d been prisoners of war performing forced labour at a local iron mine, this meant freedom. But freedom didn’t necessarily equate to safety. The camp’s 395 POWs, about half of them Canadians, were still under the effective control of Japanese troops. And so we began negotiating with them about what would happen next.
Complicating the negotiations was the Japanese military code of Bushido, which required an officer to die fighting or commit suicide (seppuku) rather than accept defeat. We also knew that the camp commander — First Lieutenant Yoshida Zenkichi — had written orders to kill his prisoners “by any means at his disposal” if their rescue seemed imminent. We also knew that we could all easily be deposited in a local mine shaft and then buried under thousands of tons of rock for all eternity without a trace.
We had no way of notifying Allied military commanders (who still hadn’t landed in Japan) as to the location of the camp (about a hundred miles north of Sendai, in a mountainous area near Honshu’s eastern coast), whose existence was then unknown. Because of the devastating American bombing, Japan’s cities had been reduced to rubble, its institutions were in chaos, and millions of Japanese were themselves close to starvation, much like us. The camp itself had food supplies, such as they were, for just three days.
Lieut. Zenkichi seemed angry, and felt humiliated by the surrender. Yet he appeared willing to negotiate our status. And after some stressful hours, we reached an agreement: The Japanese guards would be dismissed from the camp, while a detachment of Kenpeitai (the much feared Military Police) would provide security for Zenkichi, who would confine himself to his office.
To our delight, the local Japanese farmers were friendly, and agreed to give us food in exchange for some of the items we’d managed to loot from the camp’s remaining inventory — though, unfortunately, not enough to feed the camp. Meanwhile, through a secret radio we’d been operating, we learned that the Americans were going to conduct an aerial grid search of Japan’s islands for prison camps. We followed the broadcasted instructions and immediately painted “P.O.W.” in eight-foot-high white letters on the roof of the biggest hut.
Two days later, with all of our food gone, we heard a murmur from the direction of the ocean. The sound turned into the throb of a single-engine airplane flying at about 3,000 feet altitude. Then, suddenly he was above us — a little blue fighter with the white stars of the US Navy painted on its wings and fuselage. But the engine noise began to fade as he went right past us. Please, God, I thought — let him see our camp.
August 11, 2020
The Vanishing Aral Sea
The History Guy: History Deserves to Be Remembered
Published 22 May 2017The History Guy examines the Aral Sea and the confluence of geography and history.
The History Guy uses images that are in the Public Domain. As photographs of actual events are often not available, I will sometimes use photographs of similar events or objects for illustration.
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The History Guy: Five Minutes of History is the place to find short snippets of forgotten history from five to fifteen minutes long. If you like history too, this is the channel for you.
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August 10, 2020
Russia in Asia (for now)
Ted Campbell looks at some long-frozen geopolitical forces that may become more active in coming years:
The Jamestown Foundation, which some experts describe as mainly non-partisan and relatively unbiased, has published an interesting article by Paul Goble in which he reminds us that “Russia east of the Urals comprises more than two-thirds of the Russian Federation but has only about one-fifth of that country’s population. It is where most of Russia’s natural resources are to be found, though the earnings from their extraction largely go to Moscow and not to local people. The region is located three to ten time zones east of Moscow and is linked to the center by few roads or rail lines. Its people are far closer to China and other Pacific rim countries — including the United States — than to the core of the Russian Federation. Because of their roots in explorers, those fleeing oppression, and those sent there by the state for punishment, eastern Russians have always been more independent minded and entrepreneurial than Russians in central and western Russia. Perhaps the most important measure of this cultural divide is that Protestant faiths dominate the religious scene there, not the Russian Orthodox Church of the Moscow Patriarchate.”
It is related to something I have been saying for a long time: Siberia (essentially everything East of the Yenisei River (some say everything East of the Urals) is Asia …
… while Russia, per se, is an Eastern European country.
[…]
A few years ago a couple of middle-ranked Chinese officials suggested to me that one of China’s long-term strategic plans was (and I’m guessing still is) to encourage separatist movements in Siberia which, they hoped, will succeed in creating three or four (maybe even five or six) “autonomous” states in Siberia which will, like Mongolia, look, primarily to China for trade and support.
China
covetsneeds the resources, including water, that Siberia has. I have, in the past, forecast a Sino-Russian “Water War” in Siberia. But, speaking broadly and generally, the Chinese don’t like wars: they are expensive and unpredictable. They would much rather play a modest, behind the scenes role in creating a handful of weak, independent Siberian states with which they can trade to their advantage. They do not, I was told, wish to annex Siberia ~ some Chinese feel that the Qing Dynasty (1644 to 1912) went too far when it annexed what is now the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (新疆维吾尔自治区) in 18th century.(Tibet is a different matter and most of the Chinese people I know who might wish that Xinjiang was a more autonomous place, more like Kyrgyzstan, for example, believe that Tibetans are Chinese (and Uighurs are not) and Tibet is a “natural” part of China.)
I said a couple of days ago, that “Russia is a pariah state that is flailing about as it withers and dies.” But Putin is flailing about in the wrong directions. The Chinese are, I believe, cultivating and fertilizing Siberian separatist movements with a view to dismembering Russia and “liberating” Siberia. When that happens, and I’m confident that it is NOT an IF, the world will be a much different place.
QotD: Gandhi’s legacy
Some Indians feel that after the early 1930s, Gandhi, although by now world-famous, was in fact in sharp decline. Did he at least “get the British out of India”? Some say no. India, in the last days of the British Raj, was already largely governed by Indians (a fact one would never suspect from this movie), and it is a common view that without this irrational, wildly erratic holy man the transition to full independence might have gone both more smoothly and more swiftly. There is much evidence that in his last years Gandhi was in a kind of spiritual retreat and, with all his endless praying and fasting, was no longer pursuing (the very words seem strange in a Hindu context) “the public good.” What he was pursuing, in a strict reversion to Hindu tradition, was his personal holiness. In earlier days he had scoffed at the title accorded him, Mahatma (literally “great soul”). But toward the end, during the hideous paroxysms that accompanied independence, with some of the most unspeakable massacres taking place in Calcutta, he declared, “And if … the whole of Calcutta swims in blood, it will not dismay me. For it will be a willing offering of innocent blood.” And in his last days, after there had already been one attempt on his life, he was heard to say, “I am a true Mahatma.”
We can only wonder, furthermore, at a public figure who lectures half his life about the necessity of abolishing modern industry and returning India to its ancient primitiveness, and then picks a Fabian socialist, already drawing up Five-Year Plans, as the country’s first Prime Minister. Audacious as it may seem to contest the views of such heavy thinkers as Margaret Bourke-White, Ralph Nader, and J.K. Galbraith (who found the film’s Gandhi “true to the original” and endorsed the movie wholeheartedly), we have a right to reservations about such a figure as a public man.
I should not be surprised if Gandhi’s greatest real humanitarian achievement was an improvement in the treatment of Untouchables — an area where his efforts were not only assiduous, but actually bore fruit. In this, of course, he ranks well behind the British, who abolished suttee — over ferocious Hindu opposition — in 1829. The ritual immolation by fire of widows on their husbands’ funeral pyres, suttee had the full sanction of the Hindu religion, although it might perhaps be wrong to overrate its importance. Scholars remind us that it was never universal, only “usual.” And there was, after all, a rather extensive range of choice. In southern India the widow was flung into her husband’s fire-pit. In the valley of the Ganges she was placed on the pyre when it was already aflame. In western India, she supported the head of the corpse with her right hand, while, torch in her left, she was allowed the honor of setting the whole thing on fire herself. In the north, where perhaps women were more impious, the widow’s body was constrained on the burning pyre by long poles pressed down by her relatives, just in case, screaming in terror and choking and burning to death, she might forget her dharma. So, yes, ladies, members of the National Council of Churches, believers in the one God, mourners for that holy India before it was despoiled by those brutish British, remember suttee, that interesting, exotic practice in which Hindus, over the centuries, burned to death countless millions of helpless women in a spirit of pious devotion, crying for all I know, Hai Rama! Hai Rama!
Richard Grenier, “The Gandhi Nobody Knows”, Commentary, 1983-03-01.
August 9, 2020
August 8, 2020
The Cold War & Decolonization — History Summarized
Overly Sarcastic Productions
Published 7 Aug 2020Keep safe and stylish with a Red-And-Blue facemask from Volante Design, or DONATE to help students in public schools receive high-quality masks for free — https://bit.ly/2DwE9O7
August of 2020 marks the 75th anniversary of the end of the Second World War. So I wanted to make a video about that. That was a bad idea…
What do you get when a Classically-Minded historian ventures about 2,000 years outside of their comfort zone? A mess. A well-intentioned mess is what you get. BUT a mess that we can learn from! So join me as we dig into the aftermath of the Second World War to analyze the origins of the Cold War and the decolonization of European Empires.
SOURCES & Further Reading: The Cold War by Gaddis, The Wars of French Decolonization by Clayton, British decolonization, 1946-1997 by McIntyre, The Cold War’s Killing Fields by Chamberlin, The Cold War: A Very Short Introduction by McMahon, and “Crash Course European History [Parts 42-47]” by Green.
This video was edited by Sophia Ricciardi AKA “Indigo”. https://www.sophiakricci.com/
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From the comments:
Overly Sarcastic Productions
1 hour ago (edited)
Some clarifications:
North Africa did of course see conflict, the Pacific did get occupied — even the places that didn’t (eg: India) still paid for the war. Damn double-negatives.That weird Romania-Hungary-Russia border is a holdover from WWII. The border lasted until 1946 and was changed in 1947. Later in the video you’ll see the more familiar borders.
Indonesia declared Independence in 1945 (Like Vietnam), but the Netherlands didn’t withdraw until 1949, hence my mention of ’49.
August 5, 2020
August 3, 2020
Recycling is a SCAM!
J.J. McCullough
Published 29 Jun 2019Recycling is a disaster. This video was sponsored by Loonie Politics! Sign up using the code word “McCullough” for 25% off! https://looniepolitics.com/register/
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