Many thanks for your letter. You ask whether totalitarianism, leader-worship etc. are really on the up-grade and instance the fact that they are not apparently growing in this country and the USA.I must say I believe, or fear, that taking the world as a whole these things are on the increase. Hitler, no doubt, will soon disappear, but only at the expense of strengthening (a) Stalin, (b) the Anglo-American millionaires and (c) all sorts of petty führers of the type of de Gaulle. All the national movements everywhere, even those that originate in resistance to German domination, seem to take non-democratic forms, to group themselves round some superhuman führer (Hitler, Stalin, Salazar, Franco, Gandhi, De Valera are all varying examples) and to adopt the theory that the end justifies the means. Everywhere the world movement seems to be in the direction of centralised economies which can be made to “work” in an economic sense but which are not democratically organised and which tend to establish a caste system. With this go the horrors of emotional nationalism and a tendency to disbelieve in the existence of objective truth because all the facts have to fit in with the words and prophecies of some infallible führer. Already history has in a sense ceased to exist, ie. there is no such thing as a history of our own times which could be universally accepted, and the exact sciences are endangered as soon as military necessity ceases to keep people up to the mark. Hitler can say that the Jews started the war, and if he survives that will become official history. He can’t say that two and two are five, because for the purposes of, say, ballistics they have to make four. But if the sort of world that I am afraid of arrives, a world of two or three great superstates which are unable to conquer one another, two and two could become five if the führer wished it. That, so far as I can see, is the direction in which we are actually moving, though, of course, the process is reversible.
As to the comparative immunity of Britain and the USA. Whatever the pacifists etc. may say, we have not gone totalitarian yet and this is a very hopeful symptom. I believe very deeply, as I explained in my book The Lion and the Unicorn, in the English people and in their capacity to centralise their economy without destroying freedom in doing so. But one must remember that Britain and the USA haven’t been really tried, they haven’t known defeat or severe suffering, and there are some bad symptoms to balance the good ones. To begin with there is the general indifference to the decay of democracy. Do you realise, for instance, that no one in England under 26 now has a vote and that so far as one can see the great mass of people of that age don’t give a damn for this? Secondly there is the fact that the intellectuals are more totalitarian in outlook than the common people. On the whole the English intelligentsia have opposed Hitler, but only at the price of accepting Stalin. Most of them are perfectly ready for dictatorial methods, secret police, systematic falsification of history etc. so long as they feel that it is on “our” side. Indeed the statement that we haven’t a Fascist movement in England largely means that the young, at this moment, look for their führer elsewhere. One can’t be sure that that won’t change, nor can one be sure that the common people won’t think ten years hence as the intellectuals do now. I hope they won’t, I even trust they won’t, but if so it will be at the cost of a struggle. If one simply proclaims that all is for the best and doesn’t point to the sinister symptoms, one is merely helping to bring totalitarianism nearer.
You also ask, if I think the world tendency is towards Fascism, why do I support the war. It is a choice of evils — I fancy nearly every war is that. I know enough of British imperialism not to like it, but I would support it against Nazism or Japanese imperialism, as the lesser evil. Similarly I would support the USSR against Germany because I think the USSR cannot altogether escape its past and retains enough of the original ideas of the Revolution to make it a more hopeful phenomenon than Nazi Germany. I think, and have thought ever since the war began, in 1936 or thereabouts, that our cause is the better, but we have to keep on making it the better, which involves constant criticism.
George Orwell, responding to a letter from Noel Willmett, 1944-05-18.
October 20, 2019
QotD: Why Orwell wrote Nineteen Eighty-Four
October 19, 2019
Churchill Was a Drunk… or Was He? – Doped WW2 Leaders Part 2
World War Two
Published 17 Oct 2019Winston Churchill was one of the most influential figures of World War Two. But as a heavy drinker he must have been under influence of constant drunkenness, right?
Watch Part 1 about Hermann Göring here: https://youtu.be/8H7arcUi7zQ
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From the comments:
World War Two
22 hours ago (edited)
We make an effort to approach history as unbiased as possible. The result is what we think is a balanced videos on Churchill’s alcohol (ab)use. For those of you who are new here, we are following World War Two Week by Week, in which we do pay a lot of attention to all those smaller but still significant events. If you would like to watch the series, make sure to subscribe and to click here to start watching from episode one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3-A1gVm9T0A&list=PLsIk0qF0R1j4Y2QxGw33vYu3t70CAPV7XCheers,
The TimeGhost team.
Auberon Waugh’s wine book has been republished
It’s reviewed along with another book on Waugh by Henry Hitchings in the Times Literary Supplement:
“Looking back over my career to date, and at all the people I have insulted, I am mildly surprised that I am still allowed to exist”, wrote Auberon Waugh in 1980. For the remaining twenty-one years of his life he took pleasure in adding to his list of victims. Feminism and AIDS were bracketed together as “plagues”, ramblers were “semi-uniformed thugs”, the “lower classes” appeared “ugly, boring, humourless and desperately conceited”, and the female delegates at a Labour Party conference struck him as “either hunch-backed or hairy-legged or obviously lesbian”. It’s natural to associate such views with an age now pretty remote. But Waugh was born in the same year as John Cleese and Margaret Drabble; he was younger than Jilly Cooper and Vanessa Redgrave, John Prescott and David Dimbleby. Were he still alive, he would not yet be eighty.
[…]
A lot has changed since the period that Waugh on Wine covers. The British mass market is no longer in the grip of a “depraved” taste for semi-sweet wine. The drinkers he has in mind when he refers solecistically to “the hoi polloi” do not exhibit a “passion for filth” by favouring cheap Teutonic gut-rot. Pink champagne is easy to find, and Chianti is no longer the preserve of nurses hosting dinners in fifth-floor flatshares in Fulham. A large proportion of the most sought-after French wines now end up in Chinese cellars. The globalization of demand has stretched prices. When Waugh complains about the cost of 1982’s most rarefied clarets, he proposes as an alternative Château Léoville-Las Cases at £9 a bottle; anyone thinking of laying down its 2018 counterpart will have to find around twenty-five times that amount.
The durability of a few of Waugh’s claims is hard to assess. For instance, do the “semi-professional poules de luxe on the fringes of café society” continue to disappoint their admirers by failing to serve good vintage port? Yet much remains as it was. Dry white Bordeaux still doesn’t have a great following in Britain. Neither, more regrettably, do the best German wines. It is true that in America “only obvious alcoholics drink anything like as much as the ordinary English professional”. The British still go on holiday to France and return full of hyperbolic enthusiasm for some local plonk that they have been inspired to import in large quantities – only to find, once it arrives in Blighty, that it is no more potable than the contents of a fish tank. There is a certain prescience, too, in Waugh’s remark that the best wines are, increasingly, beyond English pockets “shrunk by the growing indolence, incompetence and indiscipline of our island race”.
Waugh writes entertainingly about the social life of the drinker: “A tremendous amount of unnecessary suffering goes on under the name of Liebfraumilch“. An enterprising young wine merchant is portrayed as someone who “in earlier times, might have spread terror among the fat galleons of the Spanish main”. He shies away from no quarrel: with greedy producers, covetous investors “who treat fine wine like rare postage stamps”, and wine merchants who spew out empurpled hype. Oddly, though, he clings to the belief that people choose wine in order to impress their friends, not to gratify their own palates, and he likes to pretend that perplexity exists where in fact there is none – “Aperitifs are not to be confused with aperients, which are laxatives designed to open the bowels”.
[…] Reflecting later on the effects of his “camped up” approach to writing about wine, he provided what could be taken as an epitaph for an entire stratum of maverick journalism: “I am not sure that it helps much, but it is more amusing to read”.
H/T again to Colby Cosh for the link.
October 18, 2019
Hong Kong
David Warren on how Hong Kong got to be Hong Kong:
“Hong Kong night Panorama” by Andos_pics is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0
The motto of the resistance in Hong Kong is on my lips much lately, though often I am not applying it to Hong Kong. Nor am I not. I look at this “Oriental entrepôt” (as we used to say before political correctness), where once I lived for a couple of months, from a great and widening distance. The people there are quite another generation from that which I remember; of course they seem much younger. The idea of the inhabitants of Hong Kong nearly closing the city with demonstrations, week after week, was not formerly possible to imagine. But their enthusiasm for the personal freedom they once enjoyed (under the aegis of British imperialism and colonialism, descending from opium wars), hardly surprises me.
The British approach was finally, live and let live; but it had an administrative basis. From the 1950s, Hong Kong was an experiment. What would happen if they deregulated almost everything, and cut taxes to match? If they consciously de-politicized the colonial administration? If they shrank police functions to what was needed only to direct traffic, and defeat crime? The result was, as ever, unprecedented prosperity, but more: a people who forgot the habit even of kow-towing to men “dress’d in a little brief authority.”
People were transformed, from indifferent parts in a rusting machine, to free agents. (Unfortunately, in a broader view, prosperity also kills, as people use their freedom only for material gain, and a new jackboot state grows around the need to protect against the consequences.)
Hong Kong is a city now of seven million souls. It has, as it had, economic and social classes — plenty of them — yet the present “troubles” have nought to do with class. Opposition to the Communist government is as broad as it was in all ex-Soviet states, as we discovered when the Berlin Wall fell, and nearly discovered across China in the moment of Tiananmen. Rebellion, to start, is an urban phenomenon; it begins with a sudden collective sense that “we have the numbers.” The fear, upon which all tyrannical regimes depend, evaporates. What happens next is anyone’s guess, except, we can know the regime is doomed.
2019 Hong Kong anti-extradition law protest on 16 June, captured by Studio Incendo from Flickr.
Photo via Wikimedia Commons
7 Brutal Days for the Kriegsmarine – Battle for Norway
iChaseGaming
Published on 9 Sep 2019The first few days of Operation Weserübung, the invasion of Norway, cost the Kriegsmarine‘s surface fleet dearly. While the invasion and occupation was successful the German Navy would be hampered for the remainder of the war.
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QotD: England has become the Mother Hive
In 1908, Rudyard Kipling published a short story called “The Mother Hive”. In this, the bees in a hive decide to drop all outmoded ideas of hierarchy and to make everyone equal. This includes the right of workers to eat royal jelly and to mate with the drones. In the spreading chaos that results, traditionalist dissidents are first shunned and then murdered. Eventually, the bee keeper looks into the hive, and sees the empty honeycombs and the horribly deformed offspring of the workers. His response is to poison all the bees.
Now, something like this has happened in England. In the past few generations, the whole of national life has been taken over by the cultural Marxists. They run government and the administration, and the law, and education and the media, and business too. They have imposed on us a nasty hegemonic discourse. Cultural Marxism is ultimately to be traced to European thinkers like Antonio Gramsci and Louis Althusser and the Frankfurt School. But this has come to England in American clothing. It has prestige because it was taken up by the American universities.
In America, however, the progress of cultural Marxism has been resisted, or slowed, by a strong religious right and by a written constitution that it is taking a long time to subvert. Here, we have no religious right, nor an entrenched constitutional law. In the past, freedom and common sense were safeguarded by an hereditary land-owing aristocracy and gentry. These ran the country, and did much to determine its moral tone. During the twentieth century, they were marginalised and then eliminated from government. They remain as a class — still very rich — but the tacit deal since at least the 1940s has been that they will be left alone, so long as they keep out of politics. Government has been left to middle class lefties. The effect followed the cause only after several generations. But here it is.
It may be interesting for you, as foreigners, to learn an answer to the implied question in the title of this speech. But it is essential for the English to think about the question and its answers. You see, like both the Germans and the Russians, we have had a revolution. Unlike them, we have had no obviously revolutionary event. The Russians had the storming of the Winter Palace and the murder of their Royal Family. The Germans were utterly defeated in 1945. Their cities were bombed flat. Their country was occupied and divided. Every German knows either that German history came to an end in 1945, or at least that a new chapter in German history had begun.
We do not have that awareness, and it would be useful for us to understand, even so, that we are living in a state of revolution. England has become the Mother Hive.
Sean Gabb, “A Nation of Sheep: Understanding England and the English”, Libertarian Enterprise, 2017-09-23.
October 17, 2019
England in 1550 was a remarkably unpromising location for the later industrial revolution
Anton Howes, in his investigations on the Industrial Revolution looks back in time to see where or even if England deviated from the rest of Europe in ways that made the revolution possible, thinks he’s located the crucial time:
If a peaceful extraterrestrial visited the world in 1550, I often wonder where it would see as being the most likely site of the Industrial Revolution – an acceleration in the pace of innovation, resulting in sustained and continuous economic growth. So many theories about why it happened in Britain seem to have a sense of inevitability about them, but our extraterrestrial visitor would have found very few signs that it would soon occur there. There were many better candidates, on a multitude of metrics.
[…]
But England in 1550 was by global standards quite poor. Historical GDP per capita measures are notoriously difficult to obtain, even for some countries in the twentieth century let alone the sixteenth. The historical GDP per capita of England – by far the most studied region – is still hotly debated among economic historians. Nonetheless, according to the most recent collection of estimates – the Maddison project’s database of 2018 – in 1550 our extraterrestrial visitor would have been much more interested in Belgium. England at that stage lagged behind almost all of the areas for which we have estimates: Holland, Spain, Italy, Sweden, and France. In 1600, it was behind Portugal and India. Here are the figures in 2011 dollars; the colours are by row:
Such estimates should of course be taken with a hefty boulder of salt. (Note, also, that these particular figures, called “CGDPpc”, are something of an innovation by the team compiling the Maddison Project Database – they use multiple benchmarks to improve how we compare countries’ relative incomes in any particular year, which comes at the cost of not being able to compare their growth rates, for which there are separate figures. In other words, you should read the figures by row, not by column.) But it is worth noting that the more recent research on historical GDP per capita, finally filling in some details for regions other than England and Holland, often results in those other countries seeming richer in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The more we know, the more the traces of an early English divergence seem to disappear.
Even without access to such statistics, however, our visitor would have noticed that in the mid-1550s England suffered severe food shortages. Indeed, the threat of famine would be present right up until the beginning of the eighteenth century: there was a major famine in the north of England in 1649, and even a famine in the 1690s that killed between five and fifteen percent of Scotland’s population. Britain would one day become perhaps the first famine-free region, but that did not occur until much later, when innovation had already begun to accelerate. It may even have been its result.
And England in 1550 was not just poor; it was also weak. If our visitor thought, as some historians do, that conquest and exploitation were essential for future growth, then it was Spain that had the major overseas empire, followed by Portugal. England in 1550 had no colonies in the New World, and its attempts to found them all failed until the seventeenth century, by which stage the Dutch and French had also begun to extend their own empires too. It was not until the eighteenth century that Britain began to exceed them.
October 14, 2019
Cavalry Combat & Tactics during the Napoleonic Era
Military History Visualized
Published 20 Jan 2018This video gives insights in cavalry combat and tactics during the era of Napoleon. This includes cavalry types, forms of combat, formations, organization, principles and many more.
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Rothenberg Gunther E.: The Art of Warfare in the Age of NapoleonNosworthy, Brent: Battle Tactics of Napoleon and his Enemies
Bruce, Robert B.; Dickie, Iain; Kiley, Kevin; Pavkovic, Michael F.; Schneid, Frederick C.: Fighting Techniques of the Napoleonic Age 1792 – 1815: Equipment, Combat Skills, and Tactics
Ortenburg, Georg: Waffen der Revolutionskriege 1792-1848
Planert, Ute: “Die Kriege der Französischen Revoluation und Napoleons. Beginn einer neuen Ära der europäischen Kriegsgeschichte oder Weiterwirken der Vergangenheit?” In: Beyrau, Dietrich; Hochgeschwender, Michael; Langewiesche, Dieter (Hrsg.): Formen des Krieges. Von der Antike bis zur Gegenwart, S. 149-162
Rogers, H.C.B.: Napoleon und seine Armee / Napoleon’s Army
Browing, Peter: The Changing Nature of Warfare. The Development of Land Warfare from 1792 to 1945
Citino, Robert M.: The German Way of War
Chandler, David: The Art of Warfare in the Age of Marlborough
Philip J. Haythornthwaite: Weapons & Equipment Of The Napoleonic Wars
Hughes, B. P.: Firepower – Weapon Effectiveness on the Battlefield, 1630-1850
Lind, William S.: “Maneuver”; in: Margiotta, Franklin (ed): Brassey’s Encyclopedia of Land Forces and Warfare, p. 661-667
AskHistorians: How does a commander screen his army?
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorian…Russell, Jill R.: With rifle and bibliography: General Mattis on professional reading
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QotD: Parliament and the Palace of Westminster
It is a real issue. For many years the experts have known that the Palace of Westminster, which looks so good in the background of TV news reports, is close to falling down. It was not very well built in the first place. It was quite severely bombed by Herr Hitler in 1941, and rebuilt on the cheap in the lean years after the war. A very expensive attempt to restore it in the 1980s has not held off the ravages of the years. A subway line which runs beneath it is suspected of making things worse. And now they are having to silence the great bell of Big Ben to allow unavoidable repairs to be done. Experts would like to shut the whole building down for several years and send both Houses of Parliament somewhere else. The members themselves don’t want to go. Who knows where they might end up? Worse, seen against a more ordinary background, would they look as dull and undistinguished as they truly are?
Peter Hitchens, “An Empty Parliament”, First Things, 2017-10-03.
October 13, 2019
It’s raining bombs, keep calm and carry on… – WW2 – 059 – October 12 1940
World War Two
Published 12 Oct 2019The Blitz continues while Chinese Communists are fighting Chinese Nationalist in China. But the mass bombing of civilian targets does not really do what it is supposed to.
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Source list: http://bit.ly/WW2sourcesWritten and Hosted by: Indy Neidell
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Archive by Screenocean/Reuters https://www.screenocean.com.A TimeGhost chronological documentary produced by OnLion Entertainment GmbH.
From the comments:
World War Two
2 days ago
Indy mentioned our Instagram page, where we make a daily post about what happened in the war on that day. This might be something completely different from what’s covered in these videos, or might add some more details. You can follow it by searching @world_war_two_realtime or by clicking here: https://www.instagram.com/world_war_two_realtime/. See you there!
Cheers,
Joram
Tank Chats #52 Sherman Crab Flail | The Funnies | The Tank Museum
The Tank Museum
Published on 15 Jun 2018Tank Chats playlist https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list…
Another episode in the Tank Chats Funnies Specials, looking at the weird and wonderful vehicles of 79th Armoured Division led by Major General Percy Hobart.
The Flail tank was designed to clear mines and flails were operated in the 79th Armoured Division after D-Day.
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QotD: The modern British army is custom-tailored to resist reform of any meaningful type
Talking to friends in the army, there is a real sense of anger and frustration among many mid-level officers. The veterans of [Operation] HERRICK feel that the army hasn’t learned lessons and remains bound by tradition and an inability to really learn. Candidly, many feel that the UK “lost” in Afghanistan and hasn’t yet accepted this fact. They feel the army is overly top heavy and rigid and unable to really adapt to 21st century warfare. Suggestions that much of the army exists as a structure to support rapid expansion in the future is met with a hollow snort of derision – we could never do a WW1-style rapid expansion again for the legacy reserve stocks of weapons and equipment have long since been disposed of as part of the move to RAB accounting in the early 2000s.
The operations that the army is likely to be involved in are either low level defence engagement, or as part of NATO reassurance in Eastern Europe. The chances of needing BAOR established again are slim – if we get to the stage where the UK is trading shots with the Russians, then things will be quickly escalating beyond the point where conventional weapons are of value. Home defence remains an issue, although the days of Exercise “Brave Defender” will never be repeated — the threat is completely different. There is simply no credible home threat that needs the army to deploy against invasion or insurrection. It is telling that there has been a move to get back into the Aid to the Civil Power role again, if only because having troops able to do flood relief helps generate positive headlines.
Whenever brave efforts are made to try and look again at how things can be done differently to free up funding (such as closing RHQs or making sense of the archaic HQ and regimental structure) leaks to the press ensure a media and Parliamentary furore that prevents real change being put into play. This stops the army from being able to genuinely restructure itself because the moment it tries to do so, some tired old headline such as “we don’t have an army anymore, only a militia” (an utter fallacy) appears and men of a certain generation with angry moustaches and blazers with badges and purchased medals write to their MPs. In a Parliament without a majority, it only takes a minor backbench rebellion to threaten chaos, meaning no minister will risk reform if it angers the backbenches.
The army today faces a structural and existential crisis. Too large to be properly funded, and politically barred from restructuring itself (although the recent 2017 manifesto pledge is merely to preserve the headline strength of the forces, not the individual services, so there is still hope). Denied a credible enemy that it can prepare to fight against, it has no clear rationale for why it needs to operate at a large scale when the political decision makers are increasingly set against boots on the ground for long term commitment.
Sir Humphrey, “How Do You Solve a Problem Like a Deployable Division?”, Thin Pinstriped Line, 2017-08-06.
October 10, 2019
Suez Crisis Part 2 of 2
Epic History TV
Published on 28 Dec 2017In 1956, an international crisis over control of the Suez Canal put Britain and France into direct conflict with President Nasser of Egypt, a proud Arab nationalist determined to stand up to foreign powers meddling in Egyptian affairs.
Part 2 explores how Britain, France and Israel cooked up a secret plan to invade Egypt, overthrow Nasser and reassert their standing as global powers. But when the international community, and in particular the United States, condemned their actions, the aggressors were forced into a humiliating climbdown. The repercussions for the Middle East and global history were long-lasting and profound.
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Further Reading on Suez Crisis (click affiliate links to buy on Amazon & support the channel):
Blood and Sand, Alex von Tunzelmann (Simon & Schuster, 2016) http://geni.us/QyoWs
Suez: Britain’s End of Empire in the Middle East, Keith Kyle (I.B.Tauris, 2011) http://geni.us/aqn6AH
The Suez Crisis 1956, Derek Varble (Osprey, 2003) http://geni.us/ANxBQEE
“Suez 1956”, Timothy Benson in History Today (Nov 2006)
“Suez: The Canal Before the Crisis”, Steve Morewood in History Today (Nov 2006)
“Nasser, Suez and Arab Nationalism”, Michael Scott-Baumann in History Today (Mar 2010)
“The First Suez Crisis”, Christopher Danziger in History Today (Sep 1982)
The Suez Crisis, by Laurie Milner, BBC website http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/british/…
“Andrew Bacevich reviews ‘Eisenhower 1956′”, London Review of Books (Vol.33 No.12)
“Avi Shlaim reviews ‘Israel’s Border Wars, 1949-56′”, London Review of Books (Vol.16 No.16)#EpicHistoryTV #SuezCrisis #ColdWarHistory
October 9, 2019
Theodore Dalrymple on Justin Trudeau and David Cameron
He doesn’t hate either of them, he just thinks they are either fools or knaves. As the Instapundit often says, it might be time to “embrace the healing power of ‘and'”:
No doubt it is the mark of bad character to rejoice, as I do, in the spectacle of a man being hoist with his own petard, and as the Canadian Prime Minster, Justin Trudeau, has recently been hoist. And while I am at it, I confess also that, though I know that there is no art to find a mind’s construction in the face, I cannot help also but judge people, at least to an extent, by their physiognomy. And the fact is that Mr Trudeau has a face as characterless as that of the former British Prime Minister, David Cameron. They are of the same ilk. You look at them and think “What nullities!” The main character discernible in their faces is lack of character.
David Cameron’s official portrait from the 10 Downing Street website, 3 August 2010.
Open Government Licensed image via Wikimedia Commons.It is not their fault, perhaps; besides which I, or you, might be mistaken in our assessment of them and actually they have backbones (or what my teachers use to call moral fibre) of enormous strength. In any case, there are worse things to be, especially in the field of politics, than a nullity: an evil monster, for example, would be far worse, and no one could seriously claim that either of Messrs Trudeau and Cameron are, or were, evil monsters, however little they inspire admiration.
No one, then, could accuse me of partiality for Mr Trudeau, and the abjectness of his apology for his behaviour when he was a very young man did nothing to increase my liking for him. But it seems to me that sins as a young man were venial at worst, a callow disregard of the sensibilities of others which I common in youth. I very much doubt that he was a deep-dyed racist in any dangerous way, more a silly boy having a bit of fun.
There is a serious side to this imbroglio, of course. If the political leader of an important country can be overthrown or not re-elected on so relatively trivial a ground, while at the same town no one cares in the least about his shallow but dangerous moral posturing and obviously weak-minded pandering to the ayatollahs of an absurd and ill-founded political morality, then a new nadir of decadence and cowardice has been reached. It is a difficult question of moral philosophy as to whether it would be worse if Mr Trudeau actually believed his own political correctness or merely made use of it as a means to power. If the former, he is a fool; if the latter a knave. I leave it to others to decide which is better in a politician, or indeed in any other human being, foolishness or a knavery.
Political correctness is dangerous because when fools or knaves get into power, they may try to implement its dictates. And since many people are much more concerned to appear good than to do good, and since they are unlikely to suffer the consequences of their own actions (except when hoist on their own petard), the implementation may continue for a long time after the negative effects of its dictates have become clear. When implemented, those dictates create a clientele dependent upon their continuation, which turns any attempt to undo the harm into a nasty social conflict.
Suez Crisis Part 1 of 2
Epic History TV
Published on 22 Dec 2017In 1956, an international crisis over control of the Suez Canal put Britain and France into direct conflict with President Nasser of Egypt, a proud Arab nationalist determined to stand up to foreign powers meddling in Egyptian affairs.
To understand the deep roots of the crisis we go right back to the creation of the canal in 1869, and the long history of British intervention in Egypt — all with the usual Epic History TV maps as well as loads of brilliant and rarely-seen archive film from the period.
Archive film from AP Archive http://www.aparchive.com/
Music from Filmstro https://www.filmstro.com/
Get 20% off an annual license! Use our exclusive coupon code:EPICHISTORYTV_ANNHelp me make more videos by supporting Epic History TV on Patreon https://www.patreon.com/EpicHistoryTV
Further Reading on Suez Crisis (click affiliate links to buy on Amazon & support the channel):
Blood and Sand, Alex von Tunzelmann (Simon & Schuster, 2016) http://geni.us/QyoWs
Suez: Britain’s End of Empire in the Middle East, Keith Kyle (I.B.Tauris, 2011) http://geni.us/aqn6AH
The Suez Crisis 1956, Derek Varble (Osprey, 2003) http://geni.us/ANxBQEE
“Suez 1956”, Timothy Benson in History Today (Nov 2006)
“Suez: The Canal Before the Crisis”, Steve Morewood in History Today (Nov 2006)
“Nasser, Suez and Arab Nationalism”, Michael Scott-Baumann in History Today (Mar 2010)
“The First Suez Crisis”, Christopher Danziger in History Today (Sep 1982)
The Suez Crisis, by Laurie Milner, BBC website http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/british/…
“Andrew Bacevich reviews ‘Eisenhower 1956′”, London Review of Books (Vol.33 No.12)
“Avi Shlaim reviews ‘Israel’s Border Wars, 1949-56′”, London Review of Books (Vol.16 No.16)#EpicHistoryTV #SuezCrisis #ColdWarHistory
