Quotulatiousness

October 3, 2020

“The Tory party, desirous of a fat majority, will sell the country out over Europe”

Filed under: Britain, Europe, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In The Critic, Gawain Towler sees a major opportunity for Nigel Farage and the Brexit Party:

The simple fact is that this Government had the opportunity to do something about our negotiations with the EU in the months after the election. They had a whopping great majority and the goodwill of the nation. Boris had used his ebullience to present the country with a vision that with one bound we would be free, the deal was oven-ready, he was going to get Brexit done. Yes, he had inherited the Withdrawal Agreement, a deeply duff deal, from his predecessor. His resignation as Foreign Secretary over it gave us the confidence that he recognised it as such. And yet on the 25 January, a mere month after his triumphant election victory, he signed that same duff deal and condemned the country to this slow lingering betrayal. It was not necessary to do so, he could have pointed to the election, the vote, and with the support of the country gone to Brussels and made it clear he would not sign. This he signally failed to do.

So here we are again, with the EU making threatening noises, taking legal action with leaks coming out of Berlin and London suggesting that the UK is prepared to make more concessions. A No 10 spokesman confirmed that “The PM will be speaking to President von der Leyen tomorrow afternoon to take stock of negotiations and discuss next steps.”

According to Bruno Waterfield of The Times, “This is seen broadly as a good sign – if, as expected, the British prime minister is ready to signal a bit more give on fish, state aid and subsidy control”.

Note the “more give” – there has already been a lot of giving.

The thing is that Boris is beset with problems, with the Remain lobby, both on his own green benchers and elsewhere; yet again digging up dire predictions of economic meltdown, the CBI taking the lead. The ERG group of Tory sceptics have been oddly quiet, focusing more on Covid-19 than on the clear danger of a failed Brexit. There is no pressure on one side, and a great tidal wave of it pushing him to make a deal at any cost.

Then there is the electoral arithmetic. This shouldn’t matter so far out from an election, but the rumours of Boris’s political demise and the currents swirling around the Chancellor make Labour’s slight lead in the polls a matter of concern. Labour is beginning to solidify after years of infighting, but it is not cutting into Tory support.

That is where Nigel Farage and the Brexit Party come in.

October 1, 2020

English lead and the European markets of the 1600s

Filed under: Britain, Economics, Europe, History, Religion, Technology — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

In the latest Age of Invention newsletter, Anton Howes considers the meteoric rise in lead production in England and Wales from the dissolution of the monasteries under Henry VIII to the Thirty Years’ War in Europe:

The well-preserved ruins of Fountains Abbey, a Cistercian monastery near Ripon in North Yorkshire. Founded in 1132 and dissolved by order of King Henry VIII in 1539. It is now owned by the Royal Trust as part of Studley Royal Park, a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
Photo by Admiralgary via Wikimedia Commons.

In the early sixteenth century, England was a minor producer of the stuff. It was widespread and cheap enough to be used for roofing buildings (unlike much of the rest of Europe, where copper was preferred), but the country never produced more than a few hundred tons per year. It didn’t really need to. Like stone in [the game] Dawn of Man, you could amass a stockpile and not worry too much about any leaky bucket problems [where stockpiles need to be replenished due to wastage or other “drains”]. The lead in roofs could always be recycled, and hardly any more was needed for pipes or cisterns. The vast majority of the demand came from Germany, and then the New World, where it was used to extract silver from copper ore. Even this dissipated in the mid-sixteenth century, when the New World silver mines began to switch to using mercury instead.

Yet by 1600, England was producing about 3,000 tons of lead a year, up from just 300 in the 1560s. By 1700, it was producing two thirds of Europe’s lead — a whopping 20,000 tons a year. How?

Unlike copper or iron, there is no evidence that lead mining or processing techniques were imported. If anything, they seem to have emerged from the Mendips, in Somerset, where production costs fell with the introduction of furnace smelting in the 1540s. As well as raising the extraction rates from the ore coming up from the mines, the new furnaces allowed previously unusable ores — found in the easily-accessible waste tips of old mining camps — to be smelted after some simple sifting. Unfortunately, we don’t have a clear idea of who was responsible for the innovation.

Yet the source of England’s supremacy was really, at first, religious. Following the dissolution of the monasteries by Henry VIII in the 1530s, the melting down of their roofs dumped some 12,000 tons of lead onto England’s markets — at least a year’s worth of Europe’s entire output. Although the immediate effect was to annihilate England’s own lead industry, the medium-term effect was to send the other European producers into disarray. By the 1580s, once the stockpile had depleted, England’s lead producers were among the only ones left standing. The sale of monastic lead ensured that the English retained a foothold in foreign markets, while the cost-saving innovations then gave them the competitive edge. These factors explain, at least, England’s eventual hold over the European lead market.

But there was yet another phenomenon responsible for the industry’s massively increased scale: the development of hand-held firearms. Gunpowder technology was of course centuries old, but cannon had largely fired balls made of stone or cast iron. Muskets and pistols, however, used bullets made of lead. With the proliferation of the weapons over the course of the seventeenth century, lead thus acquired a major leaky bucket problem. Bullets were too costly to recycle, leading to an estimated fifth of Europe’s annual production of lead disappearing every year — a wastage that only increased as armies grew, weapons’ rate of fire improved, and the continent experienced extraordinary violence. Europe lost an estimated fifth of its population to the Thirty Years’ War, and England itself succumbed to civil strife.

England’s lead industry thus had to drastically increase its production just to maintain Europe’s stock of lead, let alone increase it. It was from soldiers entering the fray, to trade bullets across sodden fields, that it owed its extraordinary success.

Historical Breakdown of A Bridge Too Far – Planning and Failure of Market Garden I RHINELAND 45

Filed under: Britain, Europe, Germany, History, Media, Military, USA, WW2 — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

The Great War
Published 30 Sep 2020

Support our brand new World War 2 documentary about The Battle of the Rhineland (not to be released on YouTube): https://realtimehistory.net/rhineland45

After last year’s Downfall video (with over 1 million views!) we thought we look at another classic WW2 movie and give you a breakdown about the historical figures and background. Our pick this time: A Bridge Too Far.

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» SOURCES
A. Beevor, Arnhem: The Battle for the Bridges (2018)
B. Horrocks, Escape to Action (1960)
R. Neillands, The Battle for the Rhine 1944 (2005)
Builder, Bankes, Nordin, Command Concepts (1999)
www.pegasusarchive.org
www.nam.ac.uk/explore/market-garden
www.iwm.org.uk/history/the-story-of-operation-market-garden-in-photos

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From the comments:

The Great War
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Support our brand new World War 2 documentary about The Battle of the Rhineland (not to be released on YouTube): https://realtimehistory.net/rhineland45 *

*We know that some of you don’t like the fact that we upload non-Great War content once in a while. But here are a few fun facts: Last year’s video about THAT scene from Downfall has been one of our most successful videos ever produced. It helped us spreading the word about our crowdfunding campaign last year and it also brought new subscribers to The Great War that hadn’t heard about it. And in the cut-throat world of the YouTube attention economy this is really important for our continued existence. Another “fun” fact: Both this video and the Downfall video were both claimed for copyright violation even though they clearly fall under fair use. We disputed and lost and now there is nothing we can do about the fact that someone else is earning money through our work. Just one of the reasons why it’s increasingly frustrating working with YouTube and why we are exploring other avenues for The Great War and our other projects.

Tank Revolutionary: Fuller’s Diary | The Tank Museum

Filed under: Books, Britain, France, History, Military, Weapons, WW1 — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

The Tank Museum
Published 5 Jun 2020

J.F.C. Fuller has been described as a satanist, Nazi and bigot. Director Richard Smith, explores this highly controversial character, who was pivotal to the story of armoured warfare, using Fuller’s personal diary.

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September 30, 2020

“The culture war is the ‘New Normal'”

Filed under: Books, Britain, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Andrew Doyle discusses the debate over the culture war in Spiked:

The phrase that probably best characterises the events of 2020 is the “New Normal”. Although it’s typically used to describe our changed circumstances under lockdown, it could just as easily be applied to the way in which we have all grown accustomed to the worst excesses of the social-justice revolution.

News stories that only five years ago would have been dismissed as asinine aberrations now recur with a quotidian certainty. Recent notable examples include: Princeton University confessing to “systemic racism”, leading to an investigation by the Department of Education on the grounds that racism is a violation of civil-rights law; the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts making a similar admission, thereby emboldening some of its students to produce a 100-page document full of demands so entitled that it would make Veruca Salt blush; and an academic and novelist stating that debate is “an imperialist capitalist white supremacist cis-heteropatriarchal technique that transforms a potential exchange of knowledge into a tool of exclusion and oppression”. Yes, the culture war is the “New Normal”.

Yet with all the evidence before our eyes, certain commentators persist with their view that the culture war is a right-wing myth advanced by those who are resistant to change. “There’s no actual ‘culture war’, is there?”, writes LBC’s James O’Brien: “It’s just a new way of describing disagreements between people who hate racism and discrimination and people who love it.” Then there is the Guardian‘s Owen Jones, who maintains that “a lot of what’s called ‘the culture war’ is just younger people trying to assert their different social and moral values over older generations who run most of the media”. Nesrine Malik has argued that the culture war has been manufactured by the right, although it will not have escaped most people’s attention that the majority of salvos come from the left side of the battlefield.

It’s this kind of gaslighting – to borrow the language of social-justice activists – that we have already seen from writers who insist that “cancel culture” doesn’t exist, in spite of abundant and incontrovertible evidence that it does.

This is because, as Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay have so clearly outlined in their seminal book Cynical Theories, the ideology of social justice has its origins in postmodernism, a school of thought which favours “lived experience” and multiple “ways of knowing” over objective truth. It doesn’t matter, for instance, that JK Rowling has never said or written anything transphobic — her new novel must be denounced for advancing an anti-trans agenda, even though it contains no actual references to trans people. These activists have apparently taken their cues from Humpty Dumpty in Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass (1871). “When I use a word”, he says to Alice, “it means just what I choose it to mean – neither more nor less”.

September 29, 2020

Was it actually a “Plandemic”?

Filed under: Books, Britain, Government, Health — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Sean Gabb recently published a collection of essays written during the lockdown for Wuhan Coronavirus. This excerpt is from the introduction to “Plandemic” or The Hand of God?:

My general argument is that the Coronavirus Panic should be divided under two headings. The first is the Virus itself as a medical fact and the immediate responses. The second is a set of changes already evident and sometimes advanced before the March of 2020, but that have now been greatly accelerated. Of these, the second is by far the more important. The first, even so, is of interest in its own right.

The Virus has not been all that we were told it would be. Last March, much of the world was ordered into indefinite lockdown on the grounds that we faced the greatest pandemic since the Spanish Flu of a century ago. For weeks in my own country, the BBC filled the television screens with statements by scared, sweating politicians, and lifted all restraint from its own hyperventilating staff. Now, as I write in the middle of September, we can be sure that it killed no more people than a seasonal influenza, and that most of its victims were very old or had been already weakened by some other condition. We can be sure it killed no more than seasonal influenza. Given the questionable definition of Coronavirus deaths, it may have killed many fewer.

I know that pandemic infections often come in several waves, and second waves can be more deadly than the first. But the second wave we are now said to be entering is evidenced by infections rather than deaths, and these infections are counted and published in ways more questionable than the counting and publishing of the earlier alleged deaths. I do not know what will have happened by Christmas. I suspect, however, that nothing much will have happened.

I have no fixed idea of what caused the panic. I am told that the Coronavirus was a bioweapon that escaped from a government laboratory. If it was, I can imagine that political leaders all across the world were taken aside by their own scientists, who were working on something similar, and told of the coming apocalypse. I lack the scientific understanding to judge the truth of this claim. But, if true, it would explain the panic. It would also justify the panic, so far as no one might have known for sure how infectious and how deadly this bioweapon was.

I am more inclined, though, to believe that the panic was a universal hysteria just waiting to be realised. The world at the beginning of this year was in a similar moral state to the world in 1914. There had been a generation of rising prosperity and of rising discontent. Some groups had benefitted out of proportion to their numbers and believed merit. If only relatively, others had fallen behind. Some believed the progress had not been fast enough, and that it could be hastened by various institutional changes, others that it was bad in its effects, and that it should be at least slowed. In 1914, all these discordant energies were channelled – both by deliberate policy and by popular enthusiasm – into a catastrophic war. This year, they found their outlet in the Coronavirus. Since I am making the same point, I might as well quote Marx:

    Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.

I will only add that, on the real stage of world affairs, farce is always preferable to tragedy. Facemasks are better than gasmasks. Better the statistical mirage of last spring than the genuine casualties of Verdun and the Somme.

September 28, 2020

The Elgin Marbles as oversized bargaining chips

Filed under: Britain, Europe, Greece, History, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Michael Curtis on the renewed demands that the British government return the Elgin Marbles to Athens:

Some of the sculptures in the Elgin Marbles collection on display in the Duveen Gallery of the British Museum.
Photo by Paul Hudson via Wikimedia Commons.

The internecine wars in Washington, D.C., continue over government funding, a coronavirus relief bill, government shutdown, but on September 9, 2020 one form of political truce between Republicans and Democrats on foreign affairs was announced. Eighteen members of the U.S. Congress, bilateral members of the Congressional Caucus on Hellenic issues, including the chairs of the House Oversight and Rules committees, and Foreign Affairs subcommittee on issues relating to Europe, had written a letter to British Prime Minister Boris Johnson.

It informed him, in case he didn’t know, that the Elgin marbles, EM, had been the source of controversy among allies for many decades. The letter urged the British government, already saddled by labyrinth Brexit discussions, to negotiate with the Greek government in earnest over the return of the Elgin marbles to Greece by 2021, the 200th anniversary of the modern Greek nation. The eighteen Congress people joined other Americans intruding in British affairs. On September 16, 2020 both Joe Biden and Nancy Pelosi said there can be no US-UK trade deal if Brexit negotiations undermined the 1998 Good Friday peace agreement. However, the letter of the Congress group has raised the problem of the restitution of cultural objects taken from their country of origin.

Prime Minister Johnson does not need reminding that it was Thomas Bruce, Earl Elgin, British Ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, which included Greece, who took the marbles from the Parthenon in Athens, 1801-1805. The Parthenon, the central building of the Acropolis of Athens. was built around 488 B.C. to honor a goddess called Athena, and was at different times a Christian church and a mosque. The pillars and sculptures of the Parthenon were made of marble.

Elgin, with a passion for classical antiquities, made the case that the art works in the temples of Greece, then under Ottoman control would be destroyed because of Turkish indifference. Some had been destroyed in 1687 when the Venetians attacked Athens. The Sublime Porte granted Elgin’s request to take away pieces of stone with old inscriptions or figures. Perhaps this was gratitude for British action in blocking the advance of Napoleon in Egypt. Elgin took pediment sculptur friezes, metopes, and fragmented pieces from the walls of the Parthenon, and brought them to Britain. In 1816 he sold the sculptures to the British government which then sent them to the British Museum where they have remained.

Though the letter by the 18 members of Congress might be considered impertinent, it contained no threat of any kind but attempted to spark action on a disputed issue which has emotional appeal and symbolic importance, the presence of the Elgin marbles in the British Museum. In recent years the issue has been raised by officials of the European Union as well as by celebrated private citizens such as the actor George Clooney and his wife, and co-stars Bill Murray and Matt Damon, who while working on the 2014 film The Monuments Men, about art stolen by the Nazis, thought return of the Elgin marbles to Greece was the “right thing” to do.

September 27, 2020

Dividing Up The Middle East – The Creation of Lebanon I THE GREAT WAR 1920

Filed under: Britain, France, History, Middle East — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 06:00

The Great War
Published 26 Sep 2020

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In the summer of 1920 it became clear that the many different voices and local opinions on the future of the former Ottoman provinces were going to be mostly ignored. France and Britain had their own ideas for the new mandate states in the region.

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» SOURCES
Sicker, Martin. The Middle East in the Twentieth Century (Greenwood Publishing, 2001)

Gontaut-Biron, Roger. Comment la France s’est installée en Syrie (Paris: Plon, 1922). https://archive.org/details/commentla…

Cornwallis, K. Notes on the Middle-East No.4. 1920. File 756/1917 Pt 2-3 “ARAB BULLETIN Nos 66-114” [‎374r] (756/834), British Library: India Office Records and Private Papers, IOR/L/PS/10/658.

Miller, David Hunter. My Diary. At the Conference of Paris. Vol 4. (New York, 1924). https://archive.org/details/MyDiaryAt…

D’Andurain, J. “Gouraud, Henri” in: 1914-1918-online. International Encyclopedia of the First World War, ed. by Ute Daniel, Peter Gatrell, Oliver Janz, Heather Jones, Jennifer Keene, Alan Kramer, and Bill Nasson, issued by Freie Universität Berlin, Berlin 2014-10-08. DOI: 10.15463/ie1418.10303. https://encyclopedia.1914-1918-online…

Naamany, B. “A hundred years since Sykes-Picot, maps’ reading”. General Secretariat of the Arab League. Tunis. Tunisia. 2018. http://nna-leb.gov.lb/en/show-news/98…

Meouchy, N. “Les temps et les territoires de la révolte du Nord (1919-1921).” In: Alep et ses territoires: Fabrique et politique d’une ville (1868-2011). (Beyrouth – Damas: Presses de l’Ifpo, 2014).

Raymond, André. “III – La Syrie, du Royaume arabe à l’indépendance (1914-1946)”. In La Syrie d’aujourd’hui. Aix-en-Provence: Institut de recherches et d’études sur les mondes arabes et musulmans, 1980. (pp. 55-85)

Kouyoumdjian, O. “Le Liban à la veille et au début de la Grande Guerre: Mémoires d’un gouverneur, 1913-1915″. Revue D’histoire Arménienne Contemporaine. Paris: Centre d’histoire arménienne contemporaine. 2003.

Government of New Zealand, Ministry for Culture and Heritage. “Anzac troops take revenge on Arab civilians at Surafend” https://nzhistory.govt.nz/page/anzac-….

Ministère de la Guerre. Etat-major des armées. Service historique. Les armées françaises dans la Grande guerre. Tome IX. 9, 1, ANNEXES. Imprimerie Nationale. Paris. France. 1935.

Australian Imperial Force unit war diaries. 1914-1918 War. Light Horse. Item number: 10/3/47. Title : 3rd Australian Light Horse Brigade. December 1918. AWM4 Class 10 – Light Horse. https://www.awm.gov.au/collection/C13…

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“It is a Chestertonian paradox which Chesterton himself never wrote: a government changing the nature of the state successfully and without opposition because nobody can believe what they are seeing, and so everybody politely ignores it.”

Filed under: Britain, Bureaucracy, Government, Health, Media — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

In The Critic, Peter Hitchens on the many civil institutions that have been seriously wounded — not so much by the Wuhan Coronavirus, but by government responses to it:

David Icke about to speak at Piers Corbyn’s 20 August anti-masking demonstration in Trafalgar Square.
Screencap from YouTube video – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DOZQ58uTWdw

The long retreat of law, reason and freedom has now turned into a rout. It was caused by many things: the mob hysteria which flowered after the death of Princess Diana; the evisceration of education; the spread of intolerant speech codes designed to impose a single opinion on the academy and journalism; the incessant state-sponsored panics over terror; the collapse and decay of institutions and traditions.

These have all at last flowed together into a single force, and we seem powerless against it. Absurdly, the moment at which they have achieved maximum power is accidental, a wild, out of-proportion panic response to a real but limited epidemic.

Outside total war and its obscenities, we have not seen what we are living through now. To list the constitutional events of the last few months is to ask the complacent chattering classes of Britain what it reminds them of: the neutering of parliament into a rubber stamp controlled by the executive; the death of political pluralism; the introduction of government by decree; the disappearance of the last traces of an independent civil service; the silence in the face of these events of media and courts; the subjection of the police to state edicts rather than to law.

[…]

Documents of this kind are not supposed to get out. In better times than these, with active and critical media, this particular passage — with its clear implication that it was the task of the state to scare us into compliance — might have led to the fall of the government. As it is, you will struggle to find mentions of it in the British national press. They are there, but they are hard to find and not on any daily front pages. This is not because of censorship or because of any kind of collective action.

It is because most people, having lived all their lives in relaxed freedom, are quite unable to believe what is in front of their eyes. It is a Chestertonian paradox which Chesterton himself never wrote: a government changing the nature of the state successfully and without opposition because nobody can believe what they are seeing, and so everybody politely ignores it.

This could not have happened, in my view, 60 years ago. Rigorous education, especially of the elite, had at that time created a significant class of people who knew how to think, and how to assess evidence. There would always have been someone, whether it was a Tam Dalyell or a Churchill, to point out the true direction of events and warn against them, prominently. Much of the press would have given this dissent house room, rather than obediently conforming (in order to #ProtectOurNHS). But in the intervening years such rigorous schooling has been replaced by an egalitarian education system which teaches its students what to think, not how to think. Criticism of the past is obligatory, but any cold-eyed assessment of the present — in which new ideas benevolently rule — is disliked and ignored.

As well as this, there have been the various spasms of panic and emotion which convulsed the country after the Cold War ended. These were profound attacks on reason. They were also attacks on limited government and the rule of law, which rest largely on the power of reason. Most people quite like being afraid of something, and many dislike freedom and the responsibility that comes with it. The honest among us all admit it.

Once, before Charles Darwin, Ypres and the Somme, the Christian religion answered those needs. The Fear of the Lord was the Beginning of Wisdom, and the devoted service of Christ was perfect freedom. Faith offered eternal life and helped people to accept temporal death as normal. This belief helped to sustain earthly liberty because, as Edmund Burke pointed out, the man who truly fears God will fear nothing else. No despot can get very far if there are such men around in any number.

QotD: The persuasive power of the newspapers

Filed under: Britain, Media, Politics, Quotations — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

It is a standard part of the mythology that newspapers tell their readers what to believe — and the readers believe them. This is why the left keeps shrieking about the barons controlling the press, it could only be that poisoning of the minds of the proletariat which keeps said left from sweeping all before it in politics. The actual study — you know, science — of how this works is that newspapers follow the prejudices of their readers. The Sun is not socially conservative and rightish in its views because Rupert Murdoch is so but because a large portion of the British working class is so.

Or, as we might put it, the reason the left doesn’t sweep the board with the votes of the proletariat is because large numbers of the proletariat think the left either don’t represent them, or are aware that the left are nuts.

Tim Worstall, “This Will Be An Interesting Test – Geordie Greig To Daily Mail Editor”, Continental Telegraph, 2018-06-08.

September 26, 2020

Perdition to Conspirators! Magnificent 14-Barrel Flintlock

Filed under: Britain, History, Technology, Weapons — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Forgotten Weapons
Published 29 May 2020

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Colonel Thomas Thornton was a wealthy and somewhat flamboyant character in England in the late 18th and early 19th century. He commanded a militia unit with which he had some disagreement, and which mutinied against his comment at Roborough Camp in 1795. Some years later, he commissioned this quite unique firearm from Dupe & Company of London.

The gun is a single stock with two flintlock actions, two triggers, and two clusters of seven .30 caliber rifled barrels each. Each trigger fires a complete barrel cluster simultaneously. In addition to the firepower of this very remarkable weapon, he also had it finished in a truly magnificent fashion, including the fantastic line “PERDITION TO CONSPIRATORS” on ons of the barrel clusters — clearly he harbored some resentment towards his unruly militia subordinates even years later.

In addition, he had a second stock made to fit just one lock plate and barrel cluster, for when 14 barrels might be a bit of overkill. That stock is even more decorated that the first, with beautiful wooden relief carvings and the motto “A Verite Gagner“, meaning something to the effect of “Truth From Victory”.

This gun is part of the Liege arms museum’s display of civilian arms, and I’d like to thank them for taking it out of their display so I could show it to you! If you are in Liege, stop in and see the museum:

https://www.grandcurtius.be

Contact:
Forgotten Weapons
6281 N. Oracle #36270
Tucson, AZ 85740

September 24, 2020

The End of the European Empires? | The Suez Crisis | Part 5

Filed under: Africa, Britain, France, History, Middle East, Military — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

TimeGhost History
Published 23 Sep 2020

Whilst the fighting may be over, the Crisis certainly isn’t. For starters, the three invaders may have agreed to a ceasefire, but aren’t too keen to give up the land they’ve conquered. And even if this is resolved, what lies in wait for the humiliated ex-colonial powers? Ultimately, only one thing does seem certain — irreversible change.

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Sound design: Marek Kamiński
Maps: Ryan Weatherby

Colorizations:
– Mikolaj Uchman
– Daniel Weiss – https://www.facebook.com/The-Yankee-C…
– Norman Stewart – https://oldtimesincolor.blogspot.com/

Sources:
National Archives NARA
Images from the UN News and Media
1960s Soviet Film “Egypt our Arab Ally”

From the Noun Project:
– speech_16988 By Juan Pablo Bravo, CL
– Parliament_1658396 By Dimitrios Stamatis, GB
– Money by Gilberto
– Ship by Edward Boatman
– soldier by Wonmo Kang
– oil barrel by Musmellow
– europe By Randomhero
– Income(not dollar)_2897802
– Trade by Adrien Coquet
– Handshake By priyanka, IN
– world by Guilherme Furtado
– telegraph By Luke Anthony Firth, GB
– people by ProSymbols
– documents by Srinivas Agra

Soundtracks from Epidemic Sound:
– “Devil’s Disgrace” – Deskant
– “In the Bank We Trust” – Jon Sumner
– “Searching Through Sand” – Deskant
– “The Inspector 4” – Johannes Bornlöf
– “Crying Winds” – Deskant
– “Scented Nectar” – Rune Dale
– “As the Rivers Collapse” – Deskant
– “Dark Beginning” – Johan Hynynen
– “Guilty Shadows 4” – Andreas Jamsheree

Archive by Screenocean/Reuters https://www.screenocean.com.

A TimeGhost chronological documentary produced by OnLion Entertainment GmbH.

From the comments:

TimeGhost History
2 days ago (edited)
So that’s the end of our series on the Suez Crisis. It’s been a pretty wild and messy ride, but we think our realtime format gave it a fresh perspective that hasn’t done before.

If you liked that final point Indy made about Churchill and The Beatles, and you want to find out more about decolonisation, then you should look up the work of Bill Schwarz. He was the one who originally made the comparison in his book White Man’s World, and it’s a really fascniating read, if also a bit challenging. Decolonisation is actually becoming a really vibrant field of study in academia and there are a whole host of books available if any of you want to dive into the topic. Europe After Empire by Elizabeth Buettner is an excellent place to start and Fight or Flight by Martin Thomas will be right up your street if you want to learn about the wars of decolonisation and the politics behind them. If you have any other suggestions then feel free to post them below.

Anyway, we hope you enjoyed the series and learnt a thing or two.

I thought we were supposed to speak well of the (politically) dead

Filed under: Books, Britain, Government, Media, Politics — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In The Critic, Nigel Jones examines the soon-to-be-published “political tittle-tattle” of the wife of an MP and junior cabinet minister during David “Dave” Cameron’s premiership:

For anyone who has been holidaying under a rock for the past fortnight and may have missed the furore, I should explain that Lady Swire, daughter of Mrs Thatcher’s former Defence Secretary Sir John Nott, is the wife of ex-Tory MP Sir Hugo Swire, an Old Etonian chum of David Cameron, who somehow failed to be promoted beyond the ranks of junior ministers during his pal’s Premiership, but remained a close confidante and boon holiday companion to the PM. Lady Swire herself is half-Slovenian, and though brought up in the bosom of the Tory establishment, may not be entirely attuned to the evasions, hypocrisy and double standards that make up British political life, which makes her book all the more enjoyable.

Throughout Dave’s inglorious time in office, Lady Swire kept a secret diary detailing intimacies of conversation, banter and badinage, and revealing insights that give – shall we say – a not wholly flattering picture of the ruling Tory clique at play during their most unguarded moments. The bad behaviour, petty jealousies and embarrassing remarks of Dave, George, Boris and Michael and their wives are set down in all their toe-curling cringeworthiness.

The diaries are to be published next week but have been serialised in The Times and reviewed and widely commented on in the rest of the media. The two main targets – the duopoly of Cameron and Osborne – have already expressed their displeasure at the revelations. But all the tut-tutting disapproval of Lady Swire’s profitable indiscretions misses the main point: there is nothing that the British public relishes and enjoys more than an exposé of their leaders with their dignity gone and their metaphorical trousers down.

Moreover, gossip and tittle tattle as set down in diaries often tells us more about the true nature of politics and the motivations and personalities of politicians than a thousand self-serving pompous political memoirs or dull works of dry political analysis. What we really want is gossip – the gamier the better – and all the inconvenient truths our rulers rather we didn’t know.

Very often what we learn from particular epochs of history are the telling anecdotes and juicy titbits revealed by diarists rather than the respectability that the statesmen themselves wish to present and be remembered for. Our picture of the Restoration of the monarchy in 1660, for example, and the very merry court of Charles II, along with the apocalyptic disasters of fire and plague that followed comes largely from the indiscreet journals of Samuel Pepys, Daniel Defoe, and John Evelyn.

PIAT: Britain’s Answer to the Anti-Tank Rifle Problem

Filed under: Britain, History, Military, Weapons, WW2 — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Forgotten Weapons
Published 25 Nov 2017

Sold for $3,163.

The British began World War Two with the Boys antitank rifle, but like all antitank rifles it rather quickly became obsolete. The replacement for it was adopted in 1942 as the PIAT – Projector, Infantry, Anti-Tank. This was a unique sort of weapon which fired a 3 pound (~1.35kg) hollow charge projectile using a combination of a massive spring and a firing charge much like a rifle grenade blank cartridge — a spigot mortar, really. The large (3.25″, 83mm) projectile was able to defeat almost any tank that would be developed during the war, as it could burn through 3-4 inches of hardened armor. However, it had a terrifyingly short effective range — 110 yards on paper and more like 50 yards in practice.

The PIAT would recock itself upon firing, but the initial cocking was something like a crossbow, requiring the shooter to brace their feet on the buttplate and pull the body of the weapon upwards, compressing the 200 pound (90kg) mainspring. When fired, the weapon has a pretty harsh recoil, although it did not have any flash or backblast like the American Bazooka did. By the end of the war more 115,000 PIATs had been made, and they would serve the British military into the 1950s, when they were replaced with more traditional rocket launchers.

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Cool Forgotten Weapons merch! http://shop.bbtv.com/collections/forg…

If you enjoy Forgotten Weapons, check out its sister channel, InRangeTV! http://www.youtube.com/InRangeTVShow

September 23, 2020

The Man in Monty’s Shadow – Claude Auchinleck – WW2 Biography Special

Filed under: Britain, History, India, Middle East, Military, WW2 — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 08:30

World War Two
Published 22 Sep 2020

Claude Auchinleck put military matters over that of politics. Although this angered some, mainly Churchill, Auchinleck still found himself in India, and later facing down Rommel in North Africa.

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Between 2 Wars: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list…
Source list: http://bit.ly/WW2sources

Hosted by: Indy Neidell
Written by: Francis van Berkel
Director: Astrid Deinhard
Producers: Astrid Deinhard and Spartacus Olsson
Executive Producers: Astrid Deinhard, Indy Neidell, Spartacus Olsson, Bodo Rittenauer
Creative Producer: Maria Kyle
Post-Production Director: Wieke Kapteijns
Research by: Lennart Visser
Edited by: Monika Worona
Sound design: Marek Kamiński

Colorizations by:
Norman Stewart

Sources:
National Portrait Gallery
USHMM

Archive by Screenocean/Reuters https://www.screenocean.com.

A TimeGhost chronological documentary produced by OnLion Entertainment GmbH.

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