Feral Historian
Published 3 Jul 2026“The Scouring of the Shire”, omitted entirely from the film, ties together many of Tolkien’s key themes. While Gondor shows us a contrast between the mythic Kings of old and the mundane Stewards that followed them, Saruman’s fall and revenge on the Shire shows the same transformation of evil, from a dark wizard in a tower to little men hiding behind titles and rules.
00:00 Intro
03:50 Depersonalizing Authority
05:38 The King and the State
07:04 Mythic vs Mundane
10:28 Boromir
November 2, 2026
Return of the King: On the Scouring of the Shire
QotD: Organizing a Roman Republican army
… the recruits return on the appointed day and are reassembled, probably on the campus Martius (the field of Mars, just outside the city), which in any case is where the whole process will end up moved to in the first century (probably to accommodate the larger number of Roman citizens). Moving the process outside of the ritual boundary of the city, the pommerium, would have been important, because the power of certain Roman magistrates to command armies (imperium, a crucial concept we’ll deal with when we get to the series on the Republic) only exists fully outside this boundary. It also keeps them from being hassled by the Tribunes of the Plebs (a distinct and entirely different office from the military tribunes!), whose powers don’t exist outside the pommerium. That said, Polybius doesn’t tell us where this part takes place and I don’t myself know of any source that explicitly does.
I should stop to note that this phase gets short shift in the scholarship. Brunt, Italian Manpower (1971) 625ff somehow manages to miss it entirely, conflating it with the selection of recruits in Phase I, but it is clearly a distinct stage in the process. Polybius is not subtle here: after the oaths are taken, the [military] tribunes dismiss the recruits (Polyb. 6.21.6), designating a time and place for them to reassemble without arms and then when they show up then (Polyb. 6.21.7), they are divided into units, are ordered to get their equipment and then sent home again (Polyb. 6.26.1) to reassemble one more time (Polyb. 6.26.2) when the army is properly formed. That is three clear stages: selection, apportionment and mobilization, which occur on different days in different places.
The function of this phase is the division of recruits into their constituent units. First the pedites (again, “infantry”) are split into four types: velites, hastati, principes and triarii. Polybius notes that the “youngest and poorest” are assigned to the velites, then the next to the hastati, and so on, creating a sliding scale by both wealth and age; one paragraph down he reiterates that the velites are mostly the youngest soldiers (Polyb. 6.22.1). In practice, we know that the centuries of the pedites were stratified by wealth and that wealthier soldiers were expected to bring heavier, more expensive kit (even Polybius notes this, Polyb. 6.23.14). The equipment of the velites, who were light infantry skirmishers that screened and supported the legion, would have been much cheaper than the equipment of the rest of the infantry (who were all armored, heavy infantry), so I think the right reading of Polybius is that the velites consist of both the young of all of the classes of pedites (putting green soldiers in a position to both prove their courage, but also one where if they falter it doesn’t cause the line to collapse; light infantry can retreat and advance freely) as well as the very poorest of the pedites who couldn’t afford heavier equipment even if they wanted to.1
The velites carry a sword (Livy tells us it is the same sword as the heavy infantry, the gladius Hispaniensis, Livy 38.21.13), a small shield (the smaller version of the parma; cavalry use a larger version of this shield), and javelins (Livy clarifies they carry seven of them; these are lighter javelins, the hasta velitaris, Livy 26.4) along with a modest helmet.2 The velites themselves emerge as a distinct arm of the Roman army during the Second Punic War, but an integrated light infantry skirmish force existed earlier; it’s not clear how the velites would have differed from earlier light infantry leves milites or rorarii. Perhaps not very much.
Meanwhile the heavy infantry (hastati, principes and triarii) carry a large oval shield (the scutum), a sword (the gladius Hispaniensis, a versatile cut-and-thrust sword), two heavy javelins (pila), and wear both a metal helmet (the ubiquitous bronze Montefortino-type) and body armor. Poor soldiers, Polybius tells us, wear what in Latin is a pectorale (and thus in English a “pectoral”); this gets represented as a single smallish bronze plate over the upper-chest, but our evidence for this equipment suggests a more complete cuirass consisting of a front and back plate joined by side and shoulder plates, with a broad armored belt protecting the belly, a sort of “articulated breastplate” […] Wealthier Romans were required to furnish themselves with mail. Once again, the fact that the tribunes are likely to have access to the census, and thus the self-reported wealth figures of the recruit’s households (tied to their century assignment) is going to facilitate these divisions.
Each class (except the velites) then elect ten senior centurions and ten junior centurions, with the very first fellow elected being the primus pilus, the most senior centurion of the legion. Centurions then handpick their supporting officers (the optio). We are given no clues as to how this election would be accomplished, but the numbers here we’re now dealing with are fairly small (1200 infantry per type, except just 600 triarii), so the procedures here don’t have to be that complex. The centurions then assist the tribunes in breaking up each class into maniples (120 men) and centuries (60 men), with the velites being attached to the maniples of the heavy infantry rather than getting their own, because they’re a supporting force. Meanwhile, the cavalry is being divided as well into ten squadrons, each with three officers (decuriones), who have their own optiones.
Once all of those divisions are complete, the tribunes instruct the men on how they are to arm themselves and then send them home (Polyb. 6.26.1). I should note here the Paton translation (rev. Walbank and Habicht, but I don’t think they change anything here) reads, “The tribunes having thus organized the troops and ordered them to arm themselves in this manner dismiss them to their homes” but a more strictly literal translation would run, “The tribunes, having made the divisions and given them orders concerning equipment then dismiss the men to their homes”. There’s an assumption worked into the translation that soldiers arm themselves; I think this assumption is correct, but it is not required by the text.
But of course the staging of this process only really makes sense if soldiers do self-equip. Otherwise, why send them all to their homes at this stage, when you have the entire army gathered and divided into units? If equipment was state issued, it’d be trivial to hand it all out right at this stage and then march off to war. Instead, soldiers are dispatched home with orders concerning their equipment.
Meanwhile, the process for the socii is running in parallel. We know basically nothing about this stage of their process, but it is certainly happening. All Polybius tells us is that “the magistrates [of the socii], choosing the men and administering the oath in the manner above described, send them off, appointing a commander and a paymaster” (Polyb. 6.21.5). The implication is that the socii have a similar process to the Romans (albeit in miniature as there are many communities of socii who collectively provide about as many troops as the Romans, so their dilecti – whatever name they really went by – will be much smaller). This is reflective of the Roman attitude towards the socii – they do not care how the troops are raised or paid, only that they are raised. So long as the socii show up at the appointed time with the right gear, ready to fight, the Romans are fine with the process.
But the system here mirrors the Roman one quite strongly. Each Roman army has a presiding magistrate (like a consul) and an assigned financial magistrate (a quaestor), just as each socii detachment has a commander and a paymaster. The commander of these socii units show up in our sources as praefecti cohortium and seem to have been drawn from the local elite of those communities (just like the Romans). So while the Romans are dividing into units and then heading home to buy, fetch or borrow their equipment, the socii are at work recruiting their own troops to the numbers and of the types demanded at the dilectus, arming them, making arrangements for their pay (the Romans supply food, but not pay, for the socii) and then sending them to the planned rendezvous.
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: How To Raise a Roman Army: The Dilectus“, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2023-06-16.
- In Polybius’ day, there may have been significant overlap between these two definitions just because Roman military success was likely to put enough loot in the pocket of a seasoned veles to enable him to afford the equipment of the heavier infantry.
- Perhaps in some cases a leather or textile head-covering rather than a metal one; evidence here is very thin.
November 1, 2026
How Hitler Stole an Armored Arsenal – Panzer 35(t) & 38(t) – Rearmament 12
World War Two
Published 31 Oct 2026The Panzer 35(t) and Panzer 38(t) were designed to defend Czechoslovakia. How did they end up helping Hitler invade Poland, France, and the Soviet Union?
When Germany occupied the Czech lands in March 1939, it seized far more than an inventory of weapons. It gained established factories, skilled workers, and tank designs that could help fill serious gaps in German rearmament. Captured LT vz. 35s entered Wehrmacht service, while production of the LT vz. 38 was redirected to equip Germany’s expanding Panzer divisions.
In this episode of Nazi Rearmament, Spartacus Olsson examines the development, production, and battlefield performance of these Czechoslovak-designed tanks. From Škoda and ČKD to German-controlled BMM, we follow the weapons and industries appropriated to serve Hitler’s wars of aggression.
We compare the 35(t)’s troublesome pneumatic controls with the 38(t)’s dependable mechanical design, examine their armament and armor, and trace their combat service as increasingly powerful opponents exposed their limitations. We also explore the continuing contribution of Czech engineering through vehicles including the Marder III, Grille, and Jagdpanzer 38.
Their story reveals a bitter consequence of appeasement. The Munich Agreement sacrificed Czechoslovak territory in the hope of preserving peace. The subsequent German occupation placed weapons and industrial resources in the hands of the aggressor, strengthening his capacity to wage further war.
Optimism about the west, despite current events
On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, Brivael Le Pogam explains why it’s still possible to be optimistic about western culture, even in the face of things like the coup in Poland this weekend:
People always ask me why I’m so optimistic about the West.
A few weeks ago, I told a friend I’d never been more bullish on our future. He looked at me like I’d lost my mind. So I gave him two predictions.
First: the EU, as it exists today, is going to collapse.
Second: we are going to hold a Nuremberg trial for communism. Not for people. For ideas. Because those ideas are still the ones killing us today.
Then I explained why.
There’s one law I’ve watched play out everywhere, in startups, in family fortunes, in empires:
The more a system is full of money and empty of intelligence, the faster it decays.
Take the simplest example. The son or daughter of a billionaire who inherited the money but not the education that came with it. They become parasites on what their parents built. They don’t understand what they’re running. But they’re surrounded by courtiers telling them they’re brilliant, so they feel invincible. And they start breaking things, one confident decision at a time.
That’s the West’s ruling class right now. And here’s the part people miss: a decadent system with no intelligence left doesn’t slowly drift. It collapses. Because it can’t stop making mistakes, and every mistake is bigger than the last.
Here’s what that looks like in practice.
In 2024, Marc Andreessen sat down with officials from the Biden administration. By his account, they told him not to bother funding AI startups. AI would be a game for two or three giant companies, working hand in hand with the government. When he pointed out that AI is just math, they told him that during the Cold War they classified entire branches of physics, and they could do the same with the math behind AI.
Think about who they said that to. The man who wrote “Software is eating the world.” The man who understood decades ago that whatever the state gets its hands on, it ruins. Nobody with a functioning brain walks into a room with Marc Andreessen and says that. Those people did. With total confidence.
And now, this week: Donald Tusk.
Police surrounding Poland’s Constitutional Tribunal. Government-backed judges declaring the chief justice suspended. All of it on a Friday evening, while the elected president was on a plane to Senegal, forced to turn around and fly back to Warsaw.
When you’re winning the argument, you don’t send the police to the courthouse.
This is what decadence looks like up close. Endless money. Zero feedback from reality. High on their own supply. Surrounded by people who will never tell them no.
Systems like that don’t reform. They break.
So yes, people find me optimistic. This is why. I’m not betting on these people fixing anything. I’m betting on what gets built after they’ve finished breaking it.
QotD: The soul in Greco-Roman beliefs
According to the Orphic Hymns, the soul is a divine spark that has fallen into the world of becoming and must return to the world of being. The hymns speak of Dionysus, Zagreus, and Persephone as central figures in this mystery: the soul is torn apart, scattered in matter, and later reassembled through divine rites. The initiate, by imitating this divine cycle through ritual purification, hymn, and sacrifice, undergoes rebirth.
In Hesiod’s Theogony, we see the mythic structure that undergirds this cosmology: the descent from primordial Chaos, the generation of Gaia, Uranus, and Kronos, and the eventual rise of Zeus. This procession is echoed philosophically in the chain of being. The gods in Theogony do not exist in contradiction to the metaphysical One, but as its manifest intelligences within the mythic and cosmic order. As Proclus understood, myth expresses eternal truths in symbolic form. The battles between gods, the descent of Persephone, the castration of Uranus, all become symbols of metaphysical processes: separation, individuation, and return.
The Iliad presents a world filled with divine agency. Gods walk among men, intervene in fate, and dwell in both the heights of Olympus and the underworld. In this epic, the soul of a hero does not vanish into nothingness but continues to exist in Hades. Achilles’ encounter with Patroclus in Book 23, and his conversation with the shade of Agamemnon in The Odyssey, show a world where the dead still think, speak, and interact. These passages lay the groundwork for later philosophical interpretations of soul continuity and destiny.
According to Plato’s Phaedo, the soul that pursues wisdom and virtue through its life is not bound to the cycles of reincarnation but is released to dwell in the realm of the Forms. The Phaedrus describes the soul as a winged charioteer drawn by two horses — one noble, the other base — and presents the upward path as a struggle toward divine vision and eternal beauty. These teachings were taken up and deepened by Plotinus and Proclus, who saw philosophy, purification, and theurgy as the means of ascent.
When the soul departs the body, it is judged not by a personified deity alone, but by the measure of its own harmony with the divine order. As taught in the Chaldean Oracles, and echoed in Iamblichus and Proclus, souls that have lived with virtue and piety are able to ascend through the planetary spheres, shedding the influences of fate and materiality. They are guided by gods and daimons, until they reach the realm of pure intelligibility. If the soul is unpurified, it returns through cycles of rebirth, often into new human lives, or sometimes into the bodies of animals. This reincarnation is not random, but governed by cosmic justice, in accordance with the soul’s prior deeds and inclinations.
Some souls, according to Orphic and Platonic teaching, dwell for a time in the Elysian fields — a region of light, memory, and joy — before continuing their ascent. Others remain longer in Hades, in realms of forgetfulness and shadow, undergoing correction. Yet even here, the gods provide guidance and possibility. Hecate, Hermes, and Persephone are all guardians of the dead. Offerings to the chthonic gods, libations at tombs, and remembrance of ancestors all serve to support the dead in their journey and maintain harmony between the worlds.
The afterlife is not a binary judgment, as in later Christian thought, but a complex and graduated realm where the soul’s condition matches its spiritual state. Justice is exact and unyielding, but not vindictive. Divine mercy exists in the opportunity for return, remembrance, and the path of theurgy. The ultimate goal is henosis, the reunification of the soul with the divine source, the One, beyond multiplicity, where all things become one again.
Fortissax, “A Pagan Confession”, Fortissax is Typing, 2025-08-16.
October 31, 2026
Carney’s EU dreams hit a rough patch
Canada’s propaganda outlets are doing everything they can to hide the fact that Carney’s EU love affair is going badly.
Although Canadian voters weren’t given any advance notice, the clear goal of Prime Minister Mark Carney is to move Canada deep into the orbit of the European Union. While I think this is a terrible idea, it’s very attractive to the urban managerial class in Toronto, Montreal, and Vancouver … they tend to think of the rest of Canada as being knuckle-dragging, low IQ chuds anyway, and already consider themselves to be simpatico with the Eurobureaucratic elites. Fulfilling Carney’s dream would go down well with those folks (who are already disproportionally Liberal voters). On Substack Notes, GJS links to an article on the attempt to Europeanize Canada saying:
Urban sophisticates are intoxicated by the idea of Canada “becoming more European” because they envision themselves lolling away the hours swilling café au laits and Beaujolais in quaint city squares, debating the meaning of life and whether Parmigiano Reggiano is superior to Le Gruyère. Tim Hortons, trucks and SUVs, and brutish blue collar workers will all instantly evaporate into the sky, and there’ll be no more talk of crude and barbaric matters like hockey, natural resource extraction, or Nickelback. Don Cherry and Stephen Harper will be erased from our history and we’ll ride bicycles with baguettes tucked under our arms.
At Haultain Research, Marco Navarro-Génie discusses eight things that make Carney’s EU dreams unrealistic and unlikely to come true:
How does a country become more sovereign by joining a union that makes rules but cannot vote on them? Prime Minister Mark Carney told the European Parliament this week that Canada will.
Ursula von der Leyen offered the title of “first associate member” the day before, and he welcomed it, then said at his press conference that the term was hers. But the term has no substance yet. No treaty article defines an associate member, no text sets out what Canada would take on or give up, and the two sides have agreed only to “define together” what the words mean. The sovereignty he promised rests, for now, on an aspiration with a name. The question is how it could ever work.
Start with what nobody disputes. Canada sells roughly seven of every ten export dollars to one customer, and that customer has spent almost two years proving it will use the fact against us. Albertans have been saying this since Quebec and BC blocked new pipelines to tidewater. Ottawa treated the complaint as a regional grievance, killed Northern Gateway, let Energy East die, and bought Trans Mountain only after its owner gave up. If the federal government has finally discovered that Canada needs more customers, the West welcomes the conversion, however late. Closer ties with Europe are part of any sensible answer; Europe is wealthy, democratic, and already bound to us by a trade agreement. Its future, however, is questionable.
The argument rests on emotional primacy and the claim that a closer embrace makes Canada freer.
Eight things about that claim do not add up.
The first is the use of the word sovereignty. Mark Carney used it six times in Strasbourg. He defined it as a country’s ability to make its own choices without being dictated to. Then he listed what he wants from Europe: common standards for artificial intelligence, pooled computing power, an integrated market for financial services, membership in European research and student programmes, alignment on energy and digital rules. How much of that requires Canada to follow rules made by institutions in which it has no seat and no vote? Members surrender powers and get a vote in return. A non-member who follows the rules gets the obligations without the empowering vote.
At Davos in January, Carney had a phrase for accommodating a hegemon. He called it “the performance of sovereignty while accepting subordination.” Everyone understood which hegemon he meant. The sentence today fits Brussels without changing a word.
The second is the title. Ursula von der Leyen offered Canada the chance to become “the first associate member of the EU.” Carney said that the substance matters; the substance has a name. The Union’s treaty provides, in Article 217, for agreements “establishing an association” with outside countries. Turkey has had one since 1963 and is still in the antechamber; nobody with an association agreement is a member. The adjective in von der Leyen’s sentence is inaccurate. It describes an old arrangement.
The third is where the word associate comes from. Official Canada has spent a decade repudiating colonialism: the 2008 parliamentary apology, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, Justin Trudeau accepting the word genocide, a new citizenship oath, the Vimy Memorial removed from the passport, Canada Day cancelled in city halls, names changed, and statues pulled down.
Now the same official Canada seeks its independence in the embrace of a project founded by colonial powers, with the development of their colonies written into its birth certificate. The Treaty of Rome of 1957 devoted a whole chapter, Part Four, to “the Association of Overseas Countries and Territories“, meaning the colonies of France, Belgium, Italy and the Netherlands, from the Congo to Saint-Pierre-et-Miquelon, twenty-five kilometres off Newfoundland.
That chapter is where the word “association” enters the Union’s law. It survives as Articles 198 to 204, and its annex still lists Greenland and Saint-Pierre. Canada would be the third North American party to an association with Brussels; the other two hold the word under the colonial chapter.
On Sunday (September 20) the Prime Minister flies to Saint-Pierre, French colonial territory a short boat ride from the Burin Peninsula, to affirm sovereignty beside President Macron, whose country, let me remind you again, has not ratified CETA. Nobody in Ottawa seems to have looked up St.-Pierre’s address.
Ottawa claims to fight second-hand colonialism at home but embraces it in the splendour of colonial metropoleis.
Halloween Special: War of the Worlds
Overly Sarcastic Productions
Published 30 Oct 2026Look! Up in the sky! It’s a bird! A scavenger bird feasting on the corpses of the enemies we once believed invincible! And all I did was sneeze into its open mouth a couple times!
Dracula’s Paprika Hendl from Bram Stoker’s 1897 Novel
Tasting History with Max Miller
Published 21 Oct 2025Chicken in a creamy paprika sauce with galuska dumplings
City/Region: Hungary
Time Period: 1892The first part of Bram Stoker’s Dracula is the journal of Jonathan Harker as he travels from England to Transylvania, which is written similarly to a modern travel blog. He makes note of the food that he eats, notably “a chicken done up some way with red pepper, which was very good but thirsty”. He calls it “paprika hendl” because Transylvania was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire at the time, and hendl is a German word for chicken, but today we know it as chicken paprikash.
This recipe from 1892, just five years before Dracula was published, is absolutely delicious. While Jonathan thought that his supper was “thirsty” (or spicy, causing him to drink a lot), this recipe uses sweet paprika and has a lovely flavor without the heat. The galuska are a lovely accompaniment, but you could also serve this forth with rice or other noodles. It’s a perfect homey, heartwarming dish for the fall and winter months.
Put a piece of fat the size of a large egg into a pot … When the fat is hot, add two finely chopped onions and a tin spoonful of fine red paprika, then immediately add the chicken … salt it, pour on half a liter of water, cover and, stirring often, let it simmer for half an hour. Meanwhile take care that it does not boil to pieces. When the chicken is tender, prepare a gravy thickening with 3 deciliters of very good sour cream and a small spoon of flour. Pour this into the chicken broth, stir it well, and boil together … Serve it on a long platter, surrounded by egg barley or galuska (dumplings).
— Valódi Magyar Szakácskönyv, 1892
QotD: Gerald Gardner, Margaret Murray and the rise of modern Wicca
Her terser but equally influential version of the theory was in the entry for “Witchcraft” that she wrote for the Encyclopedia Britannica, which published it from 1929 to 1968.1 For generations, if you heard about Salem and wanted to get more information about witches, you would go to the library and find the Encyclopedia Britannica, (or if you were fancy, the installment plan-financed set on your own bookshelf), reach for the “W” volume, and a few paragraphs in go, “Wow, real witches, amazing!” Murray’s theory has thus been extremely influential. Whenever a Wiccan refers to their religion as “the Old Religion” or a feminist refers to “the Burning Times”, they are alluding to Murray’s theory.
Murray had a big influence on Gardner (and wrote the foreword to his short book Witchcraft Today). Gardner claimed he did not invent Wicca but had been inducted into a coven with centuries of historical continuity, and while this claim was implausible it reflects Murray’s emphasis on an underground witch cult. Among the places Gardner describes this liturgy was his novel, High Magic’s Aid, which he would circulate to potential initiates to gauge their reaction to the rituals described therein.2 “The witch religion portrayed [there],” Hutton writes, “is that of Margaret Murray’s God of the Witches, in virtually every detail, including its dedication to a single male deity of fertility, whose name is given here (again taken from Murray) as Janicot”. The practitioner implementing the ideas of the theorist is classic performativity: there was no pagan witch religion in early modern Europe, but Murray’s claim that there had been was among the most important raw material from which Gardner created an actual pagan witch religion in mid-20th century Britain.
Through all this, there is the question of how so many 20th century scholars got it so wrong — especially given that in the 19th century, both scholars and popular culture understood that witch hunts were moral panics and mass hysteria.3 Black-Scholes-Merton may not have been a perfect description of options prices, but it got much closer to the truth than the idea of pagan survivalism, which is almost completely wrong. Hutton repeatedly notes the importance of relevant expertise, and how often the proponents of pagan survivalism lacked it. Many folklorists influenced by Frazer were simply amateurs, but Murray had legitimate scholarly expertise: she was a respected Egyptologist. This background left her equipped to see a pagan society saturated with magic, but led to a false positive when applying that gaze to Christian medieval and early modern Europe. Nonetheless, in the mid-20th century, Murray’s ideas became accepted in British academia and were integrated into K-12 history textbooks.
However, Hutton notes that such acceptance was mostly from people who did not actively research the witch trials. In contrast, witch trials were an active research area in the United States, and so American scholars remained skeptical even as the Murray thesis became taken for granted in the UK. And while it might be tempting to congratulate America for our pragmatic empiricism, Hutton notes that there was also a subtext of Americans favoring the “persecution of innocents” model for witches because it had become a popular metaphor for the Second Red Scare, as in Arthur Miller’s 1953 play The Crucible. American scholars of the 1950s and 1960s may have gotten the history of witch accusations in the 16th and 17th centuries right because they saw it as metaphor for the history of the 1930s through 1950s … which the Venona cables show they got wrong.
Gabriel Rossman, “GUEST REVIEW: The Triumph of the Moon, by Ronald Hutton”, Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf, 2025-12-01.
- Fortunately cranks writing the encyclopedia is an issue safely in the past.
- “Check out my fantasy novel (that describes the counter-cultural religion with transgressive rites that I actually practice and wish to induct you into)” is a more elaborate version of using plausibly deniable indirect speech to broach a taboo proposition.
- Volume 2 of Charles Mackay’s 1841 Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds contains a lengthy section on the early modern witch hunts that captures the 21st century scholarly consensus that witch hunts were the result of a moral panic and opportunistic expression of grudges as abetted by poor legal process. Mackay’s history differs from the current scholarly consensus only in failing to understand that witch trials were most aggressive in weak states, especially those whose establishment of religion was sufficiently tenuous as to be threatened by popular sentiment that the prince exercised insufficient brutality in defending the populace against hostis humanis generis.
October 30, 2026
Neo-kremlinologists still find value in The E-Communist, er, I mean The Economist
In The Critic, Chris Bayliss explains how the once-great Economist can still have uses in its much decayed pro-managerialist guise:
Despite what people say, The Economist is still worth reading. This is true for two reasons — firstly whilst the depth of its analysis is not what it once was, it still covers the domestic affairs of a range of developing countries that would be too obscure for other news outlets. Secondly, it is because its editorial line can give fascinating hints about the tectonic movements of managerial elite opinion. Gauging a group of people whose view of the world is driven entirely by consensus is generally a very predictable game — until the moment it isn’t. And it is The Economist we can sometimes look to for the early signs of a change of course.
For us neo-kremlinologists, the magazine has been unduly generous in the last week, providing two interesting snapshots into the neuroses and instincts of the lumpenintelligentsia at the present moment. Before I go any further, it is important to add that these people are not uniformly specious or slow on the uptake — like the Soviet intelligentsia in the 1970s, it includes many highly intelligent and perceptive people, who may be thoughtful or even forthright about the crises that beset us, but only discreetly and on an individual basis. In the atmosphere of stultifying intellectual conformity that they inhabit, what matters is what they feel comfortable discussing and admitting to one another in public, because it is that which shapes the direction of policy. And it is on that that the Economist‘s cachet can be helpful, by virtue of the freedom it lends its unbylined writers to think aloud.
It was the more recent of the two articles that has garnered the most attention. An article titled “Do immigrants from some countries commit more sex crimes?” on 25th October admitted that, yes, they do. The piece was accompanied by a graphic showing — on a logarithmic scale — the rate at which immigrants in Britain were convicted of sexual crimes, by nationality, relative to that of British nationals. The graphic showed very clearly that nationals of countries in non-EU Europe, Sub-Saharan Africa and the Middle East were substantially more likely to be convicted of sexual crimes than British nationals, with people from Afghanistan way out ahead of any other group. EU nationals, meanwhile, were slightly less likely to be convicted of such offences, and East Asians and Australasians even more underrepresented in the statistics. People from the Americans and the Caribbean were, on average, roughly equal to British nationals in their prolificness.
On social media, it was the graphic which prompted the most voluble response; particularly the use of the log scale which, visually, seemed to minimise the scale of the sevenfold disparity between the Afghan rate of sex crime conviction, and the British average. This seemed to hark back to arguments that took place during the Covid pandemic in which the use of log scales for graphs showing the number of new infections or deaths flattened the lines on the graphs and, critics claimed, made the scale of the pandemic seem less severe than it was. But whereas the use of log scales for naturally exponential processes such as viral transmission is in line with standard scientific practice, it is usually considered less appropriate — or even misleading — when the point of narrative interest is the additive difference between two figures, rather than multiplicative growth. Nevertheless, it is perfectly possible that the decision to use a log scale was made in good faith, in the interests of conserving page space.
Arguments about the x-axis notwithstanding, it is still a big deal that The Economist would print this. The fact that certain groups of migrants — especially illegal arrivals and asylum seekers from highly unstable countries — are disproportionately likely to commit rape or sexual assault has been one of the most powerful anti-immigration arguments in recent years. It is a point that defenders of the status quo have often been highly sensitive about. In polite and liberal circles, the idea of even looking for a link between national and ethnic origins and sex crimes has hitherto been considered inherently racist and demagogic. In September 2025, an open letter titled “Women against the Far Right” — which was signed by a long list of prominent leftish politicians and celebrities — included the statement that “there is no evidence that people seeking refuge are more likely to commit acts of sexual violence”. This was an easily verifiable or falsifiable objective claim, which they clearly took no effort to verify or falsify, on the reasonable-enough grounds that such data ought to be extremely hard to come by in Britain.
Update, 31 October: Welcome, Instapundit readers! 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.
October 29, 2026
Retelling (distorting) Indian history for propaganda purposes
On a recent visit to the Red Fort in Delhi [Wiki], one of the most historically significant structures surviving from Mughal times, Dr. Robert Lyman toured the museum and found that the decolonialist fanatics have taken over historical interpretation:
The entrance to the Red Fort Museum.
Photo by Amit Ranjan via Wikimedia Commons.
I popped into the museum at the Red Fort in Delhi today. I hadn’t been here since 2019, and I’d been told that the museum had been revamped. I was pleased, because the last time I’d been here it was tired. But what I encountered was both shocking and worrying. I am all for having a divergence of opinion on historical matters, and I am as conscious as anybody of the sensitivities that exist on the subject of 1857. Likewise, we all increasingly aware of the heavily-biased historical narratives forced on people in various parts of the world, and worry about them. I have been acutely aware of the “decolonisation” process in India in recent years. But I wasn’t expecting to find such flagrant nonsense being perpetrated in the holy-of-holies of Indian independence, the Red Fort, today.
But nonsense it was, displayed in bold, assertive strokes, designed to present a definitive account of the birth of modern India from the trauma of British colonialism.
The first was a warning that naughty British historians still pushed a line contrary to the truth known to all true Indians that the “war of independence” was a popular rebellion against rampant imperial oppression:
That this is chock full of contestable assertions should be obvious to all but a few unhinged Oxford academics (you know the ones I mean) and the Guardian.
There are three floors of this stuff. As one enters a fascinating definition of colonialism is presented:
I wonder what the Romans would have made of this silliness.
Likewise, I hesitate to describe the following as history, let alone an intelligent analysis of the economic impact of colonialism. When I first came across the subject at university in the 1980s it was presented as the Marxist view of history. It was vacuous and unintelligent at the time, and remains so today:
On the Christianity point, I’ve done my own count and have calculated that from a population of 200 million across the sub-continent at the time there were 120,000 Britons (including 40,000 troops) and of this number about 450 were ordained. It was going to take a long time to Christianise India on this basis …
Yezhovshchina – “the Yezhov times”
On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, Krzysztof Szczawinski outlines the career of the man who was indispensable to Soviet dictator Josef Stalin, until he suddenly wasn’t … and got erased in his turn:
Yezhov – The Butcher.
His old boss once said he had never met a more ideal worker: “Give him a task and you don’t need to check on him – he’ll get it done. He has only one shortcoming: he doesn’t know when to stop.”
Nikolai Yezhov was a small man, barely five feet tall, a former factory worker with little schooling who rose through the Party as a diligent, obedient bureaucrat. He was exactly the man the system needed.
A small and vicious man – in power, he drank heavily and liked to go down to the prisons to watch interrogations – sometimes joining the beatings himself. When his wife had an affair with the novelist Mikhail Sholokhov, Yezhov had their hotel room bugged and listened to the recordings. He watched his own bedroom just as he watched over the whole country.
His philosophy fit in one sentence: better that ten innocent people suffer than one spy escape. English law had said the opposite for centuries: better that ten guilty men go free than one innocent suffer. That one reversal is the whole difference between a civilization and a terror.
In 1936, Stalin put him at the head of the NKVD. The old boss who had praised him was shot in the terror that followed.
The West calls it the Great Purge. Russians remember it as the Yezhovshchina – “the Yezhov times”. But it was not a frenzy. It was a plan.
An order of July 1937 gave every region a quota: so many to be shot – the “first category” – and so many to be sent to the camps – the “second category”. Local chiefs competed to fulfill the plan and asked Moscow to raise their limits. Moscow usually agreed.
Torture was authorized from the top. Then came the national operations – Germans, Latvians, Finns, and above all Poles. Order 00485, signed by Yezhov, hunted an organization that did not exist. The verdicts came in albums, a few lines per person. In Moscow, two signatures sealed them – Yezhov’s and the prosecutor Vyshinsky’s – hundreds of death sentences at a sitting.
The wives of the condemned went to the camps. Their children went to orphanages.
Propaganda posters showed him crushing a many-headed snake in a spiked glove. His name means “hedgehog”, and “hedgehog gloves” is the Russian idiom for an iron grip.
In two years, around seven hundred thousand people were shot.
Then the machine needed a culprit. In 1938, Beria arrived as his deputy, and by November Yezhov was out. In April 1939 he was arrested, tortured with the methods he had perfected, and made to confess to being a spy. At his secret trial, he asked that Stalin be told he would die with his name on his lips. He was shot in February 1940.
Then he was erased – from the photographs, from the records, from the story. The terror kept his name, Yezhovshchina, so that it would not carry the Master’s.
His adopted daughter was sent to an orphanage, like the children of his victims.
The machine is never satisfied. It always needs the next name on the list – and, when the time comes, the name of the man who made the lists.
Feeding the Last Tsar of Russia – Pelmeni for Nicholas II
Tasting History with Max Miller
Published 5 May 2026Pan-fried pelmeni with smetana and fresh dill
City/Region: Russia | Siberia
Time Period: 1861For one of the most powerful people in the world, Tsar Nikolai Romanov, or Nicholas II, preferred rather unassuming foods. Instead of the extravagant French dishes that were served in the Russian court, he liked simple traditional dishes, like these Siberian pelmeni.
They are simple, but they are very good. With just beef, onion, salt, and pepper, these dumplings are delicious. I think the best way to prepare them is to boil and then pan fry them so you get a nice crispiness, but you can serve them as a soup as well. The only thing I’d change is to make them a little smaller. Elena Molokhovets is very specific on the size they should be, but I think you should make them whatever size you prefer.
Using a knife, scrape 1 1/2 lbs first-quality beef from the short loin. Add 1 finely chopped and squeezed-out raw onion, sieved black pepper, and salt. Use this filling to make pelmeni … If the beef is lean, use 1 lb beef and 1/2 lb finely chopped kidney suet. Boil the pelmeni in salted water or in bouillon in a separate saucepan … These pelmeni are best made the size of kolduny or shaped like small ears … Siberians prepare pelmeni for several occasions at once, sprinkling them lightly with flour so they do not stick together. Then they are frozen and boiled in salted boiling water as needed.
— A gift to young housewives by Elena Molokhovets, 1861
QotD: The Roman polymath Marcus Terentius Varro
Yes, the clever Romans did plenty for us, but just who was the cleverest of them all? A tricky question, to be sure, but the Romans were confident about their own answer. The doctissimus was Varro — a man who wrote 620 books, and really is one of the most impressive polymaths that people have never heard of.
Marcus Terentius Varro (116–27 BC) was born in the Sabine town of Reate (Rieti) but found his proper education in Rome. There he studied under Lucius Aelius Stilo, the Stoic grammarian and antiquarian, who can perhaps be called the first bona fide scholar of Roman descent. Later he spent time in Athens under Antiochus of Ascalon, the celebrated Platonist and reformer of the Academy. Both proved to be major influences on the intellectual scene of first-century BC Rome (Cicero also studied with both).
[…]
What built Varro’s enduring reputation was his writing. His volume of work remains truly staggering. As Augustine observed, “Varro read so much that we are amazed he had any spare time to write; but he wrote so much that we can scarcely believe he could have read anything”. His output exceeded every other Roman writer, and was scarcely equalled by any Greek writer except Callimachus. He is said to have written 490 books by the time he was 77, which would mean that, in his last twelve years, he wrote almost a book per month. No surprise that he was rumoured to have died with pen in hand.
The sheer breadth of his learning was also astounding: he wrote on the full gamut of human knowledge (with the possible exceptions of medicine and advanced mathematics): the history of Rome, its civilisation, its customs and its people, civil law, Roman literature and drama, philosophy, grammar, the history of libraries, linguistics, tidal motion, sea navigation, Greco-Roman biography, as well as a three-book account of his own life.
But we must now the bad news: over 95 per cent of Varro’s writings do not survive to us, and of over 70 separate works authored by him only one – a three-book treatise on farming (De Re Rustica) – survives in a complete state. Mercifully, we are also able to read several extant books of his fascinating treatise on the Latin language (De Lingua Latina), a work that shows such fervour for its subject that the author completely forgot about his own Latin style.
Varro’s prodigious life-span for a Roman — of ninety years — allowed him to be born ten years before Cicero and outlive him by sixteen. This gave him an unparalleled perspective of the rapidly changing social, political and intellectual narrative of the late-second and first centuries BC. No-one had seen more and learned more than this self-driven scholar.
Although Cicero regarded him as an “amazingly odd” character (mirabiliter moratus), he did bestow lavish praise on Varro for the remarkable contribution of his 41-book Antiquitates: Romans previously wandered around like strangers in a city which seemed alien and confused; but Varro’s rich researches shed new light on the capital, whose reflection in turn revealed to them their own true identity. Cicero’s private letters reveal that he worried greatly about what Varro thought of him: that fact alone is proof that, in the ancient respublica litterarum, Varro really was the apex predator.
David Butterfield, “Varro and wide”, The Critic, 2026-07-21.
October 28, 2026
Germany wants to control social media content (and Carney is taking notes)
As I’ve mentioned before, I get a lot of useful information from the German perspective from eugyppius‘s Substack, and it’s especially interesting right now as Germany explores greater state control over social media platforms:
You know what we really need in Germany, what we just don’t have enough of?
Rules.
Specifically, we need more rules about what you can say and to whom you can say it, and more rules about what you’re allowed to read and watch and the kinds of content third-party platforms are allowed to serve you.
We need these rules because right-wing extremism and because Russian disinformation and because Trump and because Alternative für Deutschland and because all the other evils that exist solely and exclusively because of people being allowed to say things and hear things and see things in unmonitored unregulated ways.
Above all we need more rules because we don’t yet have enough rules, even though I swear we have an order of magnitude more rules governing media and speech than any other country in the developed world. We need more rules to rein in scary technological demons that live in the internet, like Social Media Algorithms, which are Literally Destroying Our Democracy by feeding German social media users a steady diet of far-right Russian Trumpist fascist Hitler propaganda. If only it weren’t for these demonic fucking algorithms putting wrong opinions into everyone’s brains, everything in the Federal Republic would be peace joy and pancakes right now, Friedrich Merz would have a 70% approval rating, Sachsen-Anhalt would be in the capable hands of a Green government and Ukrainian Armed Forces would be approaching the gates of Moscow.
The main problem with Social Media Algorithms, apparently, is that they give you too much of the content you like and not enough of the content you don’t like. Stopping these exploitative tactics and ensuring that your feed is filled also with things you don’t care about and never want to see is among the goals of our powerful Broadcasting Commission, as they hammer out the second part of their new Digital Media State Treaty (DMStV).
The intensely necessary, urgently needed and desperately required additional regulations of the DMStV include a provision addressing “the diversity of journalistic content on social media“. This item will foil the demon algorithms by requiring social media platforms to lard users’ feeds with 20% diversity-certified journalistic content. One out of every five videos YouTube recommends and one out of every five tweets in your X feed will have to be diverse! journalistic! content! if and when these draft rules take effect. For the purposes of these obviously warranted rules, anything produced by German public media outlets will be considered diversity-certified automatically, because why not. Private media companies, on the other hand, will have to prove their journalistic integrity and “diversity-promoting” nature before their posts can count towards this 20% quota. The individual State Media Authorities, bastions of far-sighted integrity and wisdom, will decide which private media companies get to count as “diverse”.
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