The Korean War by Indy Neidell
Published 23 Dec 2025Both sides finally release POW information to each other, as required by the Geneva Convention, but neither side is happy with the information, charging it either wildly incomplete or grossly mischaracterized. The Communists also refuse to allow the Red Cross in and the UN doesn’t want compulsory repatriation of POWs, but both are required under Geneva. And away from the truce tables, the Communist air power menace continues to grow, but should there be an armistice will they be allowed to rebuild air bases in North Korea?
00:00 Intro
00:38 Recap
00:58 POW Lists
05:02 Repatriation
07:52 Geoje-Do
09:01 Ambush Program
09:54 Airfields or Armistice
12:00 Communist Air Power
13:23 Summary
13:32 Conclusion
14:50 Call to Action
(more…)
December 24, 2025
The Korean War Week 79: Soviet Technology Surpasses the USA – December 23, 1951
December 17, 2025
The Korean War Week 78: Communists See 100% Success in the Skies! – December 16, 1951
The Korean War by Indy Neidell
Published 16 Dec 2025The Communist forces’ air power grows and grows, to the point where the UN wonders if they will lose aerial supremacy. This colors the Peace Talks, because should infrastructure be allowed to be rebuilt and rehabilitated during an eventual armistice, what airfields might the Communist side soon have in North Korea? Not just as a threat should an armistice fail, but to Japan as well.
Chapters
00:00 Intro
00:49 Recap
01:23 General Hsieh Probes
06:22 Communist Air Power
12:06 POW Issues
14:54 Summary
15:14 Conclusion
15:51 Call to Action
(more…)
December 14, 2025
Hitler becomes a German – Rise of Hitler 23, January-March 1932
World War Two
Published 13 Dec 2025The big news this winter is the German Presidential elections, held now in March for the first time since 1932, which pit current President Paul von Hindenburg against Nazi Party leader Adolf Hitler. Hitler, though, must become a German citizen before he can run; he been stateless since he gave up his Austrian citizenship seven years ago. The campaigns are quite different, but both effective, and the German people head for the polls.
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December 13, 2025
QotD: Victorian mores, homosexuality, and the Empire
The public school phenomenon, which probably isn’t a euphemism but we’ll use it as one. You know, the whole “beatings and buggery” thing, and I’m going to stop now, because of course you know what I mean. Lots of Old Boys from all tiers of the public school system really did go out to run the Empire because they wanted to escape Victorian women, who were indeed as bad as that in a lot of cases (again, think “Karen on steroids”). But how much of that “to escape women” thing was because the women were awful, and how much of it was because the Old Boys were not-very-repressed homos?
This is where modern identity politics really messes up historical analysis. We probably all know that the vast majority of Victorian homosexuals were married, because the vast majority of Victorians were married. This isn’t my professional field, but because I went to grad school I’m pretty well up on it – the ivory tower finds Victorian poofters endlessly fascinating, because they are huge homo cheerleaders (obviously), but also because of the costumes.
Women and gay men love playing dress up — have you noticed? — and Victorian dress up is the best, because it’s a) expensive, and b) time consuming, but also c) flattering to just about any body type. It was socially acceptable among the upper classes to be porky (and nobody dresses up like a chimney sweep or factory hand), so both men’s and women’s fashion in the Late Victorian era can accommodate modern bodies. (Unlike the early Victorian era, which continued Regency fashion. They’d love to dress up Regency style — there’s a reason “Regency romance” is the most popular genre of light porno books for cat ladies — but it takes a specific physical type to pull off, and they don’t have it). […]
Anyway, where was I? Oh yeah — lots of people in grad school really, really into Victorian queers, so if I seem extremely well informed on this topic, don’t read too much into it.
“Repressed homosexual” was redundant back then. Oscar Wilde, for instance, was sort of the ur-homo — he was so gay, just gazing too long at a picture of him at his dandiest could give you an uncomfortably strong urge to touch a penis. […] Oscar Wilde was also married, and had two children, because that’s how even the queerest of the queer rolled in Victorian London.
Given that, you’d expect one of two things to happen to public schoolboys once they got out into the bush. Either they’d totally let their freak flag fly — you know, given that everyone else in their social world was an equally repressed public schoolboy — or they’d bottle it up even further, because it was important to show nothing but the best image of Her Majesty’s servants to the wogs at all times.
As far as I know, the latter was almost universally the case. Before the opening of the Suez Canal (1869), you could have a nonstop bacchanalia over there … if you were straight. Those guys could, and did, rock the casbah with extreme prejudice. It started tapering off early in Victoria’s reign, but in the late 1700s you had British army officers converting to Islam (no, really) for the express purpose of getting even more tail, by marrying the Koranically sanctioned four wives (sometimes with all the age of consent queasiness that implies).
The repressed homos, on the other hand, got really into scholarship. It’s not generally known (because even then the vast majority of their works were of interest only to micro-specialists) but Anglo-Indians were insanely productive scholars, on every conceivable topic. You could fill a decent sized library with their five-, seven-, nine-volume works on Sanskrit philology, and the botany of the lower Himalayas, or the migratory habits of tigers, or pretty much anything. And if they weren’t the scholarly sort, the repressed homos simply threw themselves into their work, of which there was always an endless supply — take a look at a map of India, recall that there were at most 200,000 Britons in the whole place, and you’ll see what I mean.
So: Were they going out there to get away from Victorian women? Absolutely. Were they therefore going to turn the place into Studio 54? Absolutely not.
Severian, “Ruling Caste II”, Founding Questions, 2022-03-10.
December 12, 2025
Re-orient your map to understand China’s view of the world
CDR Salamander provides a helpful guide to seeing the world, specifically their Pacific front, by turning your map sideways. I hope you won’t look back on this from a slightly later date when the maps get all flaggy and arrow-y:
I first saw this map three years ago, and it recently resurfaced in my thoughts.
I remain convinced that a lot of the problem with trying to get everyone to fully understand the challenge in the Western Pacific is that to a large part, we think in a “north-up” orientation.
I don’t think that is all that helpful.
Just a few days ago, we had another Pearl Harbor Day anniversary and we’ve all seen the maps, usually centered on Hawaii, where the Imperial Japanese Navy’s Kidō Butai comes at the Pacific Fleet from stage left off the map. Then we fought battles in the Coral Sea, Midway, and so on.
To the lay eye — or to those who don’t have time to dig into the reasons — a traditional north-up map looks disjointed; things seem all over the place.
No, not really. Let’s bring back that first map.
[Click to embiggenate]
For both Imperial Japan in the early-mid 20th century and Communist China today, the most important part of this map is the access to the resources in or going through the bottom-right hand corner.
Today’s greatest bone of contention — not unrelated to the most important part of the map mentioned above — is Taiwan, right at the mouth of the funnel.
If we need to bring a fight there, that is one hell of a fight to get there if the People’s Republic of China (PRC) wants to prepare a proper welcome for us.
For the PRC, the primary military threat to plan for comes across the Pacific into a funnel that terminates at its most important SLOC. It’s the United States of America, and the US has a series of islands leading right into the heart of the PRC’s. It starts in Hawaii — Midway, Wake, Guam — and then to U.S. allies: the Philippines, Japan, and Australia.
They’re planning a layered defensive fight. Their actions make that clear.
Make no mistake, we may say we are going to “defend Taiwan”, but to do that we will have to fight an aggressive war across the Pacific, into the enemy’s prepared funnel.
Update, 13 December: Welcome, Instapundit readers! Please do have a look around at some of my other posts you may find of interest. I send out a daily summary of posts here through my Substack – https://substack.com/@nicholasrusson that you can subscribe to if you’d like to be informed of new posts in the future.
December 10, 2025
The Korean War Week 77: The Korean Winter Bites Hard – December 9, 1951
The Korean War by Indy Neidell
Published 9 Dec 2025Now that they’ve agreed on a Demarcation Line, the talk this week at the Panmunjom peace talks has turned to whether there will be restrictions or not after the signing of an armistice. Also, how would inspections work to make sure the other side is complying with the armistice terms? Perhaps a group of representatives from neutral nations? Meanwhile the troops are digging in to their winter defenses, as the frozen Korean winter descends upon them.
Chapters
00:00 Intro
00:48 Recap
01:16 Two New Points
08:42 Korean Winter
11:47 Communist Defenses
13:20 Summary
13:33 Conclusion
14:28 Call to Action
(more…)
December 6, 2025
Battle of Tarawa, 1943
Real Time History
Published 5 Dec 2025The Marine and US Army landing on the Tarawa Atoll’s Betio and Makin islands were the first operations in the new Central Pacific front of the Pacific War. Tarawa was one of the deadliest amphibious landings for the Marine Corps which hadn’t yet perfected such complex operations. But the lessons learned at Tarawa would already be applied a few months later at Kwajalein and Eniwetok.
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December 5, 2025
Abolish the Temporary Foreign Worker program
The CBC presented a sob story about a restaurant owner in Lloydminster who had to reject over a hundred job applicants because they couldn’t cook Indian food to her satisfaction. I’m no great cook, but there are about a dozen Indian dishes I make regularly that are, in my opinion, nearly as good as I can get from any of our local Indian restaurants. I’ve never been trained in cooking and I don’t have access to all the ingredients, but I do well enough. I’m sure that with some training and access to a proper restaurant kitchen I could do much better … as could a lot of those rejected job applicants, I bet.
Ms. Garner added the next day:
The more I think about this story the more preposterous the assumption behind it becomes — that no one out of the 100 applicants the owner rejected could be taught to cook at this place.
Yet the article essentially accepts this preposterousness as fact.
Abolish the TFW program.
As Fortissax responded:
December 3, 2025
The Korean War Week 76: Is America Favouring The Communists? – December 2, 1951
The Korean War by Indy Neidell
Published 2 Dec 2025This week at the Panmunjom Peace Talks the two sides agree on a Demarcation Line for an armistice based on the current battle lines, provided the other items on the agenda have been dealt with within 30 days — or else it is invalid. There is still a huge issue, though concerning rotation and replenishment of force during an armistice, and also the right of inspection. The two sides are very far apart on all that. And 8th Army Commander Jim van Fleet issues orders which are misconstrued in the global press and lead to some embarrassment for Washington.
#KoreanWar #peacetalks #Korea #history #militaryhistory #Ridgway
Chapters
00:00 Intro
01:02 Recap
01:44 Item Three
05:08 Inspections After Armistice?
07:53 Ridgway’s Concerns
09:54 The POW Issue
11:45 Van Fleet’s Instructions
13:51 Summary
14:26 Conclusion
16:36 Call to Action
(more…)
Battle of Peleliu 1944
Real Time History
Published 18 Jul 2025In September 1944, the US 1st Marine Division is on its way to another amphibious invasion in the Pacific – the tiny island of Peleliu. For almost half the Marines it will be their baptism of fire against veteran Japanese troops with a new defensive doctrine. Some American commanders call for the operation to be cancelled, but it goes ahead. By its end, half the Marines and all the Japanese will be killed or wounded – but was Peleliu worth it?
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December 1, 2025
Why Uncle Sam entered the Vietnam War – W2W 055
TimeGhost History
Published 30 Nov 2025The Vietnam War didn’t begin with American boots on the ground. It began with a promise — and a break. After the French defeat at Dien Bien Phu in 1954, the Geneva Accords split Vietnam at the 17th parallel. Ho Chi Minh led the North. In the South, Ngo Dinh Diem struggled to hold a fragile new state together while armed sects, crime syndicates, and political rivals challenged his rule. Washington saw Vietnam as the next battleground of the Cold War, and threw its support behind Diem — believing he could stop the spread of communism in Southeast Asia.
But as elections for reunification approached, tensions rose. Diem refused the vote. The North rebuilt. The South descended into repression, unrest, and quiet rebellion. Former Viet Minh fighters slipped into the shadows. Secret networks formed. Targeted killings began. By 1958, the storm clouds of a new war gathered — one the United States could no longer afford to ignore.
This episode explores how the U.S. found itself pulled into Vietnam, how Diem rose to power, why the reunification election collapsed, how American aid reshaped the South, and how the first sparks of insurgency ignited a conflict that would define a generation.
Join us as we trace the origins of a war long before the Marines landed at Da Nang — to understand why Uncle Sam entered the Vietnam War in the first place.
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November 26, 2025
The Korean War Week 75: Insurgency Behind The Lines! – November 25, 1951
The Korean War by Indy Neidell
Published 25 Nov 2025While there is no battle action this week, there is still a lot of fighting, as the UN forces must constantly watch their backs against the thousands of guerrillas in the hills of South Korea. At the truce talks, the Communist side accepts the UN proposal for a demarcation line — Item 2 on the agenda — but for it to be valid the other three items remaining on the agenda must be dealt with within 30 days, which seems very optimistic to most. There is also the question of post-armistice inspections teams; are they a good idea? Or will they simply provide the other side with much-needed actionable intelligence?
Chapters
00:00 Intro
00:45 Recap
01:08 Guerilla Actions
03:19 Hanley’s Numbers
05:37 The Demarcation Line
08:04 Inspection Teams
10:36 Ridgway’s Opinion
12:06 The Agenda
12:48 Summary
13:04 Conclusion
13:57 Call to Action
(more…)
November 25, 2025
You might as well watch Guru Nanak Jahaz, since you’ve already paid for it
The Canadian government loves handing out money — they hand out a lot of money — so it shouldn’t be surprising to find out that Canadian taxpayers funded the creation of a movie about a Sikh terrorist who assassinated a Canadian official … or that the assassin is the hero of the movie. After all, isn’t that the heart and soul of multiculturalism? Celebrating other cultures and traditions as being superior to those of ordinary Canadians? The feds seem to believe it.
If you can find a way to watch the recently released Khalistani propaganda film Guru Nanak Jahaz, you might as well watch it. You paid for it, after all.
The film, which depicts the assassination of a Canadian civil servant by a Sikh terrorist as a heroic act of justice, has a “Funded by the Government of Canada” credit at the end. It was also supported by the B.C. government and gives special thanks to Conservative MP Tim Uppal and Liberal MP Sukh Dhaliwal. While the Liberals didn’t return a request for comment, a spokesperson for Uppal told me that he was not involved in the film and that the filmmakers did not communicate with him about the credit at any point.
Set in 1914, the plot follows the assassin, who you likely never heard about, and the voyage of the more familiar Komagata Maru, a ship which carried nearly 400 Indian passengers from Hong Kong to Vancouver, only to be denied entry to Canada. It was screened in some Cineplex theatres earlier this year.
The official narrative that you’ll find on government websites explains that this was purely a matter of baseless Canadian racism, and it’s been wholeheartedly adopted by politicians today: as prime minister, Justin Trudeau apologized for the incident in 2016, and the Conservative party releases annual statements commemorating the event, praising the bravery of the passengers and their craving for freedom.
That’s the whitewashed version, however. It leaves out that the Komagata Maru voyage was organized by the Indian Ghadar movement — the word literally means “revolution” — which advocated for violent resistance against the British Empire. (India was a British possession at that time and would continue to be until 1947). Its members were primarily Sikhs who lived in North America. And while they did experience racism, and while changes to Canada’s immigration laws in 1908 indirectly restricted Indian immigration, there were also reasons for the Canadian government to be apprehensive.
Ghadar members dreamed of a return to India, but wanted to rid that land of the British first. They remembered the Indian Mutiny of 1857 with regret — that bloody event saw many British-Indian regiments unsuccessfully take up arms against the Empire; Sikh Punjabis were among the exceptions, largely siding with the British. Decades later, the mostly Sikh Punjabi Ghadarites proposed another 1857-like uprising while applauding anti-British terrorism.
When rumblings of war with Germany began to brew in 1914, the Ghadarites grew excited — now was the time to strike. In August 1914, after the war broke out, the movement’s newspaper advocated, “Go to India and incite the native troops. Preach mutiny openly. Take arms from the troops of the native states and wherever you see the British, kill them. … There is hope that Germany will help you.” Expats in the Orient organized ships to return home and revolt.
The Komagata Maru was part of this movement. Organized by Ghadarites before the breakout of the First World War, it attempted to bring more movement adherents into Vancouver to settle. Canada was right not to let it dock because the entire envoy was a security threat.
The S.S. Komagata Maru was at the centre of an attempt to bring 400 Sikh revolutionaries into Canada to agitate for the destruction of British rule in India in 1914.
November 24, 2025
QotD: Talking like a Marxist, living like a Maharaja
My google-fu isn’t strong enough to come up with this particular piece of Pop Culture Kayfabe (didn’t they once open for Exploding Vagina Candle?), but I saw some comedian, my old tired brain says Dave Chappelle though it probably wasn’t, talking about how hard it must’ve been to be Prince’s personal assistant. So much of that job would boil down to “trying to convince your boss that the impossible is, in fact, impossible”.
Along the lines of “No, Prince, I can’t arrange for you to ride a giraffe around Central Park. For one thing, it’s 3am, all the zoos are closed …”
It was funny at the time, but considerably less so now, because Our Betters are really like that now. And they’re ALL like that. I’m pretty sure I told y’all about the time I fixed the toilet at a faculty party. It was in this beautiful “restored” Victorian house (“restored” meaning “it has all the most ostentatiously expensive Victorian ephemera, with all the most ultra-modern conveniences”). The toilet wouldn’t stop running if you flushed it without following this elaborate handle-jiggling procedure that they’d discovered over weeks of trial and error, then carefully wrote down and taped to the top of the tank. Due to scheduling conflicts they weren’t able to get the “restoration” specialist out there to look at it for another month or so …
I’m nobody’s idea of a plumber, but even I can recognize it when the little chain loops around the plug and keeps the float from rising all the way. So I finished my business, took the lid off the tank, unwrapped the chain, and told my hosts to go ahead, it’s “fixed” now. Carefully explaining what I did and why. You don’t even need a regular plumber, let alone some period-specialist interior decorator, I told them. Just … unloop the chain. Takes five seconds. Costs nothing.
They, and everyone else at the party, were aghast. Not at my mastery of the arcane details of plumbing, but that I’d fixed something. You know, with my hands. With that one little act — something so simple, it’d need to be ten times more complicated to even qualify as “basic plumbing” — I’d excommunicated myself from The Anointed. It’s just not done, old sock — we’re afraid you’re no longer our sort. Only Dirt People “fix” things.
That’s their mental world. Z Man used to talk about having worked for a Congressman as a kid, and having to mow the guy’s lawn. For whatever reason the lawn service didn’t make it on the day of some soiree, and none of the guy’s staffers — the very best and brightest, Ivy League grads all — could figure out how to start the mower. They’d never done it before. They’d never even seen it done.
If that’s the world you live in, is it any surprise they fall for the honey pot?
In their world, things just … happen. Electricity comes from the wall socket (remember Pete Buttigieg actually saying that, re: EVs? I can’t seem to find a clip for some reason, but I’m sure it happened). Food comes from the store. Indeed, it doesn’t even come from the store, it comes from the fridge.
You probably think I’m joking, but I’ve seen it at close range. Indeed I’ve experienced it myself, in India, where one simply doesn’t live without servants. Yes, in the very best Colonel Blimp style. It’s not a race thing, it’s a class thing — you will grievously offend your university sponsors, without whom no work can be done in-country, by not living in “middle class” style while you’re there. Which means they hook you up with servants; you tell them where you’re staying (and of course you follow their suggestions; you do not browse the classifieds in Delhi or Mumbai), and pretty soon Choti just … shows up.
N.b. that “Choti” isn’t her personal name. It’s a nickname, a pretty demeaning one — it literally means “shorty”. Little girl. Imagine you have some random chick coming into your house to do all your shopping and cleaning and laundry for you, and that’s what you call her, to her face: “Some chick”. Because they’re all called that.
At first it’s extremely uncomfortable … and then it’s really, really, really fucking nice. Hungry? Don’t worry about it — you just tell Choti what time you expect to be home for dinner, and it’ll be there. You just step out of your clothes wherever, and leave them there — they’ll be back tomorrow, laundered and pressed and folded and there in the drawer. Need to go somewhere? If you’re in a real hurry you can go down to the street and grab an autorickshaw — they’re everywhere — but if you want to arrive in style (which is to say, not drowning in your own sweat, because it’s 100 degrees out and autorickshaws don’t have air conditioning), you call a car.
How much does all this cost? Don’t worry about it. No, really — don’t worry about it. Don’t ask. For one thing, it’s impolite — yes yes, of course all Indian university people are not just Marxists, but usually batshit insane Naxalites, by which I mean they’re batshit by Academic Marxist standards. If you think that stops them from exploiting the poor Chotis of the world like the most obnoxious maharaja, then you, my friend, need to find another blog; you obviously don’t grok the first thing about Leftism.
But more important even than the social element is the fact that Indian currency is worthless. Don’t worry about it, because it’s a rounding error. I am not independently wealthy, and academic grants are not generous (except when you get a shitload of them, and launder the fuck out of them, which is what several big important University offices are designed to do … but individual grants are not generous, usually). It’s just that the exchange rate is like 200 : 1. Have you ever heard the terms “lakh” and “crore“? In India, cars, for example, are priced in lakhs and crores. If your Mercedes-Benz costs one crore rupees — that’s 10 million — then whatever you’re paying Choti doesn’t even qualify as a few pennies per day; Sally Struthers weeps.
(Anyone else remember those ads? The Christian Children’s Fund; they were everywhere in the 80s. Wonder what happened to it? Those ads seem to have been completely scrubbed from YouTube, although of course my google-fu is weak).
See what I mean? All that — cooking, cleaning, bespoke meals, car service, etc. etc. — “costs” what amounts to a handful of Monopoly money (like all Third World countries, India makes their currency look like toucan vomit.
Yep, all with the same picture of Gandhi-ji on the front).
Trust me: after a certain point, you really don’t worry about it. Everybody with me? And yes, I know I sound like a complete dick right about now — that’s the point. You end up acting like a dick, even when you try not to, because you can’t not. I mean that quite literally. You would insult everybody — your sponsors, Choti, the butcher, the baker, and the candlestick maker — if you tried to do any of this yourself. It’s not done. And because it’s not done, you have no idea what anything really costs; you don’t even have any idea how to start finding out.
In short, and in the simplest possible terms: For any reasonable value of it, if you want it, you just tell a guy, and it appears.
That’s the world they live in. Now, it’s important to note that I didn’t try this with, uhhhh, outcall massage services and the like. Nor hard drugs. But I don’t doubt that I could’ve made that happen, with very little effort — I assume you just tell your driver, the way (I’ve heard) it’s done here, with cabbies and so forth. Or you just go down to the liquor store. Despite their prudish public image, Indians drink like fish; they just don’t buy it themselves. They send their guy for that (the male version of Choti, colloquially known as “Raju”, although for whatever reason that is an insult, where “Choti” isn’t). If you go down to the liquor store personally, you’ll be the only guy there who isn’t a version of Raju, so you’ll be spoiled for choice. I assume all you have to do is pick a Raju, flash him a discreet handful of Monopoly money, and let him take care of it.
Severian, “I Love the Honey Pot!”, Founding Questions, 2025-08-18.
November 23, 2025
Battle for the Mediterranean, 1940
Real Time History
Published 4 Jul 2025In the summer of 1940, the British Empire faces German attacks against the home islands a new Italian adversary in the Mediterranean Sea, the lifeline to its colonies around the globe. In a series of campaigns the British beat back the Italians and eliminate parts of the French fleet. But the service of its overseas subjects won’t come for free.
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