One of the peculiar phenomena of our time is the renegade Liberal. Over and above the familiar Marxist claim that “bourgeois liberty” is an illusion, there is now a widespread tendency to argue that one can only defend democracy by totalitarian methods. If one loves democracy, the argument runs, one must crush its enemies by no matter what means. And who are its enemies? It always appears that they are not only those who attack it openly and consciously, but those who “objectively” endanger it by spreading mistaken doctrines. In other words, defending democracy involves destroying all independence of thought. This argument was used, for instance, to justify the Russian purges. The most ardent Russophile hardly believed that all of the victims were guilty of all the things they were accused of: but by holding heretical opinions they “objectively” harmed the régime, and therefore it was quite right not only to massacre them but to discredit them by false accusations. The same argument was used to justify the quite conscious lying that went on in the leftwing press about the Trotskyists and other Republican minorities in the Spanish civil war. And it was used again as a reason for yelping against habeas corpus when Mosley was released in 1943.
These people don’t see that if you encourage totalitarian methods, the time may come when they will be used against you instead of for you. Make a habit of imprisoning Fascists without trial, and perhaps the process won’t stop at Fascists. Soon after the suppressed Daily Worker had been reinstated, I was lecturing to a workingmen’s college in South London. The audience were working-class and lower-middle class intellectuals — the same sort of audience that one used to meet at Left Book Club branches. The lecture had touched on the freedom of the press, and at the end, to my astonishment, several questioners stood up and asked me: Did I not think that the lifting of the ban on the Daily Worker was a great mistake? When asked why, they said that it was a paper of doubtful loyalty and ought not to be tolerated in war time. I found myself defending the Daily Worker, which has gone out of its way to libel me more than once. But where had these people learned this essentially totalitarian outlook? Pretty certainly they had learned it from the Communists themselves! Tolerance and decency are deeply rooted in England, but they are not indestructible, and they have to be kept alive partly by conscious effort. The result of preaching totalitarian doctrines is to weaken the instinct by means of which free peoples know what is or is not dangerous. The case of Mosley illustrates this. In 1940 it was perfectly right to intern Mosley, whether or not he had committed any technical crime. We were fighting for our lives and could not allow a possible quisling to go free. To keep him shut up, without trial, in 1943 was an outrage. The general failure to see this was a bad symptom, though it is true that the agitation against Mosley’s release was partly factitious and partly a rationalisation of other discontents. But how much of the present slide towards Fascist ways of thought is traceable to the “anti-Fascism” of the past ten years and the unscrupulousness it has entailed?
George Orwell, Unpublished Preface to Animal Farm, 1945.
June 10, 2021
QotD: “Defending” democracy using totalitarian methods
June 9, 2021
Very Rare and Mostly Pointless: the Bren Fixed Line Sight
Forgotten Weapons
Published 25 Feb 2021http://www.patreon.com/ForgottenWeapons
https://www.floatplane.com/channel/Fo…
Cool Forgotten Weapons merch! http://shop.bbtv.com/collections/forg…
The very early production MkI Bren light machine guns were made with two dovetail brackets on the left side of the receiver. The rear one was for the standard rear sight, and the front one was to accommodate two types of optical sights. A mounting for the No.32 telescopic sight (the same one used on the No4(T) sniper rifle) was planned, but never produced. What was made in small numbers by the Plessey company was a “fixed line sight”. This was really more like a surveyor’s tool than a traditional sight, and it used the same optical element as the Vickers dial sight that was introduced alongside it in 1939. The purpose was to allow a tripod-mounted Bren to be set up with specific limits to its field of fire, and then for the gun to be removed, used on the bipod elsewhere, and returned to the tripod and confirm the field of fire, especially in the dark. This is a somewhat technically complex task, but not one that was actually needed very much for the Bren. As a result, production and use of the fixed line sights was very limited, and the sights are extremely rare today. The mounting bracket on the Bren receiver was rather quickly dropped from production as an unnecessary waste of machining time.
Contact:
Forgotten Weapons
6281 N. Oracle #36270
Tucson, AZ 85740
June 8, 2021
QotD: Magna Carta
- That no one was to be put to death, save for some reason (except the Common People).
- That everyone should be free (except the Common People).
- That everything should be of the same weight and measure throughout the Realm (except the Common People).
- That the Courts should be stationary, instead of following a very tiresome medieval official known as the King’s Person all over the country.
- That “no person should be fined to his utter ruin” (except the King’s Person).
- That the Barons should not be tried except by a special jury of other Barons who would understand.
Magna Charter was therefore the chief cause of Democracy in England, and thus a Good Thing for everyone (except the Common People).
After this King John hadn’t a leg to stand on and was therefore known as `John Lackshanks’.
W.C. Sellar & R.J. Yeatman, 1066 And All That, 1930.
June 7, 2021
The History of the Scottish Flag
History With Hilbert
Published 4 May 2018One of the most prominent parts of the Union Flag is the Scottish Flag or Saltire, which is a bonny flag in its own right as well. In this video, as part 2 of my series on the Union Flag and the flags that make it up, I’m going to look at why this flag became the Scottish flag, what’s the symbolism behind it and which ones came before it. Lots of vexiology, historiography and etymology to come, strap in because this, is History with Hilbert!
Music Used:
“Sneaky Snitch” – Kevin MacLeod
“Up and Away” – Holfix
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9YmM_…
“Heroes – CO.AG”:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V9yVZ…
“Eastern Thought” – Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 LicenseAll images are from the Public Domain of Wikimedia Commons and Pixabay.
June 6, 2021
Turning Point of History: D-Day Juno Beach
ch1201
Published 8 Nov 2014Examines Canada’s role on June 6th, 1944 and the advance through Normandy, France.
June 5, 2021
Bren MkI: The Best Light Machine Gun of World War Two
Forgotten Weapons
Published 24 Feb 2021http://www.patreon.com/ForgottenWeapons
https://www.floatplane.com/channel/Fo…
Cool Forgotten Weapons merch! http://shop.bbtv.com/collections/forg…
In the years after World War One, the British military wanted a new machine gun, and they wanted it to replace both the Lewis and the Vickers. Through the 1920s the British would tinker with most of the light machine guns that became available, but it was not until the early 1930s that a serious formal trial was conducted. The initial trials found three particularly encouraging guns; the ZB-26, Madsen, and Vickers-Berthier. Over a series of followup testing, the Madsen and Vickers-Berthier were both eliminated, leaving the Czechoslovakian ZB as the final choice.
The British were extremely enthusiastic about the qualities of the ZB, and it is understandable why. The final .303 British version, the Bren, is widely regarded as the best magazine-fed light machine gun ever made. In its final preproduction trial, one of the prototype guns endured a 150,000-round trial without any real problems.
The design was licensed for British production as well as in the Dominions, and would be put into production at both Enfield in England and the John Inglis company in Canada. About 30,000 were produced before the Dunkirk disaster, which would lead to simplification of the design. But those changes are a subject for another video later…
Contact:
Forgotten Weapons
6281 N. Oracle #36270
Tucson, AZ 85740
From the comments:
Jeffrey Holdeman
5 hours ago
Ian- “this video is getting a little long already”Everyone else- “so what!”
Notable Discomfort
2 hours ago
Ian: “This video is a little long already.”
Everyone: “Baby doll, you take all the time you need, I’m in love with every second you take. Every minute you take to explain this rifle is a minute I get to spend with you and your comforting voice. Don’t never apologize. There’s nothing to be sorry about.FLIBFLAGGAFLUP
2 hours ago
The sheer amount of Victoria Cross citations that start with “he picked up a Bren gun” is stupendous, like a WW2 cheat code.
QotD: British wartime censorship
At this moment what is demanded by the prevailing orthodoxy is an uncritical admiration of Soviet Russia. Everyone knows this, nearly everyone acts on it. Any serious criticism of the Soviet régime, any disclosure of facts which the Soviet government would prefer to keep hidden, is next door to unprintable. And this nation-wide conspiracy to flatter our ally takes place, curiously enough, against a background of genuine intellectual tolerance. For though you are not allowed to criticise the Soviet government, at least you are reasonably free to criticise our own. Hardly anyone will print an attack on Stalin, but it is quite safe to attack Churchill, at any rate in books and periodicals. And throughout five years of war, during two or three of which we were fighting for national survival, countless books, pamphlets and articles advocating a compromise peace have been published without interference. More, they have been published without exciting much disapproval. So long as the prestige of the USSR is not involved, the principle of free speech has been reasonably well upheld. There are other forbidden topics, and I shall mention some of them presently, but the prevailing attitude towards the USSR is much the most serious symptom. It is, as it were, spontaneous, and is not due to the action of any pressure group.
George Orwell, Unpublished Preface to Animal Farm, 1945.
June 4, 2021
“I’m talking about the Pride flag. That omnipresent rainbow eyesore. A virtue-signal made cloth.”
Brendan O’Neill seems to have had it up to here with the rainbow flag being used everywhere at all times, the unbearable annoyingness of Pride:
“Pride Flags, Commercial Street, Provincetown, Credit: Tim Grafft/MOTT” by Massachusetts Office of Travel & Tourism is licensed under CC BY-ND 2.0
I see the flag-shaggers are out in force. No, not working-class people who hang the Union flag from their living-room window as an expression of pride in their nation. I’m talking about the Pride flag. That omnipresent rainbow eyesore. A virtue-signal made cloth. The flag no one can escape. Yep, it’s Pride Month, which means that everywhere you go for the next four weeks – the bank, the supermarket, Maccy D’s – you’ll have this flag waved in your face to remind you not to be such a horrible, homophobic piece of shit. Happy Pride Month!
God, Pride has become annoying. It’s so gratingly ubiquitous. I haven’t seen this much smug flag-waving since 100,000 Guardian readers wrapped in the EU colours, tears streaking their blue-painted faces, descended on Whitehall to demand the cancellation of stupid northern people’s votes. And yet the people who cry “flag-shagger!” every time Keir Starmer stands stiffly next to the Union flag, or when Robert Jenrick goes on TV with a backdrop of showy British memorabilia, are curiously silent about the adorning of every building in the land with the bloody Pride flag.
You can’t move for rainbows right now. The Pride flag will flutter from town halls across the country. Some schools in Scotland will fly the flag for the whole month. I can’t be the only person who found the photo of school pupils wearing Pride face masks beneath a vast Pride flag somewhat chilling. It’s borderline cultish. Go to a cashpoint machine and you’ll be told about Pride. Coutts Bank on The Strand in London once painted its entire facade in the Pride colours. That was a very expensive way of saying: “We’re nice, I swear.”
Cops will wear Pride-coloured badges. They’ll do dad-dancing at Pride marches and everyone will go wild for it (except the Daily Mail probably). The army is getting in on the act. It is using Pride Month to showcase its British Army LGBT+ Network. If this doesn’t become a meme featuring someone in the Middle East saying “They say the next bombs will be dropped by people who believe in gay rights! Don’t you love progress!”, I will lose all faith in the internet. Even the Beano is flag-shagging. It posted a comic strip featuring Dennis the Menace in a Pride-coloured jumper. I preferred him when he was bullying Walter the Softy.
Snacks are propaganda now, too. Who can forget M&S’s Pride sandwich, which was basically a club sandwich with added guacamole (“Gays like guacamole, right?”). McDonald’s has created Rainbow-coloured boxes for its French fries, which was definitely one of the key demands of the radicals who took part in the Stonewall riot of 1969 that Pride is meant to commemorate. Skittles surely caused even Pride aficionados’ eyes to roll when they released limited-edition white versions of their sweets, because “we are giving up our rainbow to show support for the LGBTQ+ community”. (It is testament to the insanity of intersectionalism that the only complaint about this conceited act of corporate virtue-signalling was that the sweets were white.)
Tank Chats #109 | Scorpion & TV15000 | The Tank Museum
The Tank Museum
Published 30 Oct 2020Join The Tank Museum’s Historian David Fletcher as he discusses the TV15000, the unique prototype of the FV101 Scorpion armoured reconnaissance vehicle. David examines its development and how it came to be the production Scorpion we know today.
(more…)
June 3, 2021
The Supernatural Adventures of Arthur Conan Doyle | B2W:ZEITGEIST! I E.19 Spring – 1923
TimeGhost History
Published 2 Jun 2021Being the creator of the legendary Sherlock Holmes has made Arthur Conan Doyle famous for his scientific rationality. But Doyle also has a deeply held belief in the existence of the spirit universe. In a world still reeling from the shock of the Great War, he is not alone.
(more…)
QotD: Simon de Montfort
Simon de Montfort’s Good Idea
Simon de Montfort’s Idea was to make the Parliament more Representative by inviting one or two vergers, or vergesses, to come from every parish, thus causing the only Good Parliament in History. Simon de Montfort, though only a Frenchman, was thus a Good Thing, and is very notable as being the only good Baron in history. The other Barons were, of course, all wicked Barons. They had, however, many important duties under the Banorial system. These were:
- To be armed to the teeth.
- To extract from the Villein(*) Saccage and Soccage, tollage and tallage, pillage and ullage, and, in extreme cases, all other banorial amenities such as umbrage and porrage. (These may be collectively defined as the banorial rites of carnage and wreckage).
- To hasten the King’s death, deposition, insanity, etc., and make quite sure that there were always at least three false claimants to the throne.
- To resent the Attitude of the Church. (The Barons were secretly jealous of the Church, which they accused of encroaching on their rites — see p. 30, Age of Piety.)
- To keep up the Middle Ages.
(*) Villein: medieval term for agricultural labourer, usually suffering from scurvy, Black Death, etc.
W.C. Sellar & R.J. Yeatman, 1066 And All That, 1930.
June 2, 2021
Media Fearmongering
Laura Dodsworth on how the BBC and other British media outlets turned all the dials to 11 to ramp up fear over the spread of the Wuhan Coronavirus:
The media have served us a cornucopia of frightening articles and news items about Covid-19 in 2020 and 2021. While writing my new book, A State of Fear: How the UK Government Weaponised Fear During the Covid-19 Pandemic, I encountered a panoply of doom-mongering headlines. These were an indication of the significant role the media have played in creating our state of fear.
Of course, news media should not shy away from reporting frightening news during a pandemic. They should make us aware of the numbers of deaths, the policies being implemented to tackle the pandemic and the latest scientific developments. But during Covid, the media went beyond reporting on the pandemic. Instead, they appeared beholden to the old commercial imperatives, “If it scares, it airs”, and “If it bleeds, it leads”. It seems fear does sell.
The anxious, frightened climate this has helped to create has been suffocating. Death tolls were constantly brandished without the context of how many people die every day in the UK, and hospital admissions were reported while recoveries were not. As a result, Covid often appeared as a death sentence, an illness you did not recover from – even though it was known from the outset that Covid was a mild illness for the majority of people.
Given the wall-to-wall doom, it is therefore no surprise that the British were one of the most frightened populations in the world. Various studies showed that we were more concerned than other countries about the spread of Covid and less confident in the ability of our government to deal with it. One survey in July 2020 showed that the British public thought between six and seven per cent of the population had died from Covid – which was around 100 times the actual death rate at the time. Indeed, if six or seven per cent of Brits had died from Covid, that would have amounted to about 4,500,000 bodies – we’d have noticed, don’t you think?
While researching A State of Fear, I interviewed members of the general public about how they were impacted by the “campaign of fear” during the epidemic. Many talked of how the media had elevated their alarm.
“There wasn’t much to do”, Darren told me, “so we’d watch TV and we saw programmes about disinfecting your shopping when it arrives, and having a safezone in the kitchen. The nightly bulletins on the TV about death tolls, the big graphs with huge spikes on them, came at us ‘boom, boom, boom!’. It was a constant barrage of doom and gloom. My fear of the virus went through the roof.”
Sarah told me she had to stop watching the BBC. As her daughter put it, “If you just watched or listened to the BBC every day, what hope would you have had?”. Jane, meanwhile, described the “gruesome headlines” that came at her “thick and fast”.
The fearmongering about Covid began even before the pandemic hit the UK. We were primed by videos from Wuhan in China, which were then widely circulated by UK-based media outlets. These painted an apocalyptic picture, featuring collapsed citizens, medics in Hazmat suits, concerned bystanders and a city grinding to a halt. In one memorable video, which went viral, so to speak, a woman fell, stiff as a board, flat on her face, on a pavement. The split second where she falters is a giveaway – this was a set-up. If the rest of the world had Covid, China had “Stunt Covid”.
June 1, 2021
What Orwell wrote about in The Road to Wigan Pier applies just as well to the modern Labour Party
David Starkey points out that while the best contemporary analysis of the collapse of the Labour vote may come from Rod Liddle, he is in many ways just echoing the words of George Orwell in The Road To Wigan Pier:
“The first thing that must strike any outside observer,” Orwell’s analysis begins, “is that Socialism in its developed form is a theory confined entirely to the middle classes.” “The typical Socialist is not”, he explains, “a ferocious-looking working man with greasy overalls and a raucous voice. He is either a youthful snob-Bolshevik … or, still more typically, a prim little man with a white-collar job … [and] a social position which he has no intention of forfeiting.”
He — and even more it must be said she — is also likely to be odd. Here Orwell is unsparing. And spot on. “There is,” Orwell declares, “the horrible — the really disquieting — prevalence of cranks wherever Socialists are gathered together.” “One sometimes get the impression,” he continues, “that the mere words ‘Socialism’ and ‘Communism’ draw towards them with magnetic force every fruit-juice drinker, nudist, sandal-wearer, sex-maniac, Quaker, ‘Nature Cure’ quack, pacifist, and feminist in England.”
Oh and vegetarians. And beards. And “high-minded women”. And homosexuals, like the two “dreadful-looking old men”, clad “in pistachio-coloured shirts and khaki shorts into which their huge bottoms were crammed so tightly that you could study every dimple”, whom Orwell encountered on a bus in Letchworth. And so — effortlessly out-Liddling Liddle — on.
Above all, Orwell identified the same disdain for the working class. “Are these mingy little beasts,” he reflected after attending one Socialist conventicle, “the champions of the working class?”
“For every person there”, he recalled, “bore the worst stigmata of snobbish middle-class superiority. If a real working man, a miner dirty from the pit, for instance, had suddenly walked into their midst, they would have been embarrassed, angry and disgusted; some, I should think, would have fled holding their noses”.
“The truth is,” Orwell concludes, “that to many people calling themselves Socialists, revolution does not mean a movement of the masses with which they hope to associate themselves; it means a set of reforms which ‘we’, the clever ones, are going to impose upon ‘them’, the Lower Orders.”
But Orwell was writing in 1937. Not 2021. So how on earth did the Labour party, with even then such a freakish, repellent cadre at its core, survive and thrive as the great mass movement that, for a time, it became and whose passing Liddle laments?
Rise and Fall of the Sikh Empire explained in less than 7 minutes
Epimetheus
Published 8 Oct 2019Rise and Fall of the Sikh Empire explained in less than 7 minutes Sikh history documentary
This video covers Sikh history from the Guru Nanak till the fall of the Sikh Empire.
This video and others like it are sponsored by my Patrons over on patreon.
https://www.patreon.com/Epimetheus1776
Undoing Dr. Beeching’s cuts
In The Critic, Brice Stratford looks at the British government’s “nationalization if necessary, but not necessarily nationalization” scheme to once again reform Britain’s passenger railway network:
Astonishing scenes this week, whereby the Tory government announces a White Paper to re-nationalise the railways. The union bosses and Guardianistas who have called for such policy for decades immediately decided that actually it’s a terrible idea, or that this doesn’t count as re-nationalising because it’s the Conservatives doing it, or that calling the new entity “Great British Railways” just because it will run Great Britain’s railways is so offensive that the entire project should be called off. It’s all very tribal, and very silly, and very 2021, alas.
Of course, the Department for Transport (DfT) is still afraid of admitting that this is in fact renationalisation, as to do so would be to rile up certain elements of the Right, and to admit what we all know: that their generations-long experiment in railway privatisation has been a failure. Today we have a service which is overpriced, unreliable, and generally an unpleasant and ineffective experience from start to finish.
The postwar Labour government included railway nationalization in its many, many reforms to the economic life of Britain and in 1948 the remaining railway systems were unified as British Railways. By the 1960s, the system was losing money at a high rate of speed, so Dr. Beeching was called upon to recommend how to put the railway if not into profit then at least into a much more acceptable rate of loss:
Maps originally from Losing Track by Kerry Hamilton and Stephen Potter (1985), by way of Is Your Journey Really Necessary?, 2012-12-31.
https://isyourjourneyreallynecessary.wordpress.com/2012/12/31/nice-work-if-you-can-get-there/
Click map to enlarge.
The aim of the Beeching cuts, which followed on from a pair of reports written by Dr Richard Beeching in 1963 and 1965 for the British Railway Board (of which he was Chair), was to turn the loss-making British railways network into a profitable enterprise. Prioritising this profitability over all else, he proposed axing about a third of Britain’s then 7000 railway stations, removing passenger service from around 5000 route miles, and cutting 70,000 jobs over three years. The moves were highly controversial, and though they certainly saved money, the social consequences were extensive and the scars remain visible today.
As a consequence of the cuts, Britain became over-reliant on car travel, and over the 1970s and 80s town planners gutted the experientially human-scale city centres in service of this newly favoured road transport. We still very much feel the consequences of the Beeching axe today, whereby a rail journey between neighbouring cities is often only possible by zigzagging up to London and back down again, and public transport between rural communities is limited to one bus service every hour or two in the morning and mid-afternoon, which crawls along at a testudinian pace, further isolating and atrophying the scattered settlements that once were happy, thriving homes.
