… it’s worth looking at the theoretical options the Japanese had to rein in the Kwantung Army … except they didn’t really have any.
The Lytton Commission was commissioned by the League of Nations to investigate the Mukden Incident, which was one of those false flags the Kwantung Army was fond of. They used it to seize Manchuria — technically a province of China — and set up a puppet government they called “Manchukuo” (under the Qing Emperor who was deposed in 1911 — who was 5 at the time — thus giving it a veneer of historical legitimacy). The Lytton Commission concluded that the Mukden Incident was indeed a false flag; that Japan was the aggressor; and that Manchukuo was a puppet state that should be dissolved, with Manchuria returning to Chinese sovereignty.
That’s bad, because if you’re Japan and you do any of that, you’ve now knuckled under to not just the West, but the worst hypocrites of them all (“Lytton” was Victor Bulwer-Lytton, the 2nd Earl of Lytton, formerly governor of Bengal and Viceroy of India, and oh, by the way, how exactly did Britain come to rule in India? The shit they pulled makes the Mukden Incident look like very small beer indeed). And it’s bad from the Chinese side, too, because now you’ve basically tied their hands in any peace negotiations — they can’t conclude any kind of honorable peace without getting Manchuria back, and as should be obvious from the above, you must pry Mantetsu from Japan’s cold, dead hands.
Still, Japan might’ve disciplined guys like Ishiwara … but how? You can’t cashier him; the Army would go insane. You can’t really transfer him — as much trouble as he’s causing in Manchuria, if you bring him home you might well have another February 26 Incident, and it might work this time. You certainly can’t execute him, because a) you’d have to take his entire faction with him, which would decimate your officer corps, and b) perhaps more importantly, the seizure of Manchuria was pretty popular. Mantetsu’s Media boys hadn’t been sitting on their hands during all of this, of course, and the Army’s Media people had been going nuts too.
In the end, the Japanese pretty much had no choice: They gave the League of Nations the finger. Which of course emboldened the KA even more, such that they cooked up an even faker and gayer false flag, the Marco Polo Bridge Incident, and WWII was on.
Severian, “Slipping the Leash”, Founding Questions, 2022-08-27.
August 19, 2026
QotD: The Kwantung Army was the tail wagging the Japanese Imperial dog
August 15, 2026
QotD: “The progressive is a walking paradox”
If I loudly claim to love vanilla ice cream, yet every time I return from the Mr Whippy van I’m holding a choc-ice, my revealed preference is evidently for chocolate — not vanilla.
Thus the truth of a person’s preferences is revealed through their actual choices and behaviour, not by what they claim to prefer.
It’s unfortunate we can’t simply listen to their words, but they are so oriented toward the external, the aesthetic, and the performative (“Theater Kid Progressivism”) that we must instead look at their proximal behaviours — where they actually choose to live and raise their families, for example, to extrapolate backwards their true feelings on mass migration and its consequences.
This is the lens through which we should try to understand our Progressive class.
The bitterest irony, the irony of ironies, is this: progressives, especially those who voted for it, self-evidently do not feel at home in the societies they helped create.
If they were genuine believers, they would live contentedly amidst their new friends.
Instead, they scuttle off into the countryside, the leafy suburbs, or gated enclaves, abandoning the very demographic transformation they imposed on others.
It is often said that if liberals didn’t have double standards they wouldn’t have any at all, but while this is very funny (and true), there’s more to it.
It reveals a profound non-confluence between their stated attitudes and their actual behaviours, indicative of extreme cognitive distortion.
They protest performatively that open borders and rapid demographic change are a universal good, even moral imperatives and (admittedly less often nowadays) sources of strength.
Yet when it comes to their most intimate revealed preference — where they opt to live and raise their families — they consistently prioritise homogeneity, good schools, and cultural familiarity.
They lobby and vote without end for policies that maximise immigration into lower- and middle class neighbourhoods, then abandon those very communities for pastures anew, safely insulated by postcodes and house prices.
Their revealed preference is that do not want to live in the Canada (or Britain, or America, or Europe) they are busily helping to construct.
They enjoy the vibes, the moral status, the Instagram aesthetics, while quietly falling back to the leafy, high-trust environments their grandparents took for granted.
Progressives love to speak of taboos (indeed if there is a pastime more alluring and intoxicating to the progressive than “breaking taboos”, I am yet to come across it, but I digress) yet is the greatest taboo of all right in front of us after all, carrying a basket of organic fruit and veg from Waitrose?
To interrupt the Progressive in the midst of his communal dream state, to turn our collective eye away from the brave new world they are building for us and to instead look inwards, to look the Liberal cuckoo directly in the eye and put words to the disparity between their words and their actions …
The subject of lawful and legal deportations is increasingly mainstream, yet what of urban renewal and rewilding by means of progressive importations?
The Progressive is a walking paradox, he is both the centre of attention and the ghost at the feast all at once.
Æthelstan, The social media site formerly known as Twitter, 2026-05-14.
August 14, 2026
What Did the Builders of Stonehenge Eat?
Tasting History with Max Miller
Published 17 Feb 2026Roasted pork ribs with blackberries and honey with Stonehenge Nettle and Hazelnut Soup
City/Region: Britain
Time Period: 3000-1500 BCEAbout 2 miles from Stonehenge is Durrington Walls, the place that archaeologists believe was the living settlement for the people who built and used Stonehenge. Amongst the evidence of what was eaten, there are a lot of bones, about 90% of them being pig bones. Based on scientific analysis of the pig teeth found there, they were probably fattened on something sweet, which would have probably been honey or berries, so I’m using both to prepare these pork ribs.
This is a simple preparation, but these ribs are so good. The honey is the dominant flavor and the blackberry does come through. The other 10% of bones found at Durrington Walls were mostly cattle, so you could use beef ribs instead if you’d like, you’ll just have to cook them longer.
(more…)
August 12, 2026
QotD: The art of admitting our mistakes
The painting below by Paul Cézanne demands our consideration. It cannot be passively observed. The glassy patch of water in the lower right-hand corner is where the painting – “Reflections in the Water” – gets its name. Our eyes are naturally drawn to the thick tree on the bank whose ghost is captured on the surface of the pond where the foliage gives way, but really it is the slim sapling, unreflected, unbroken, rising boldly along the canvas’s left edge, that is the true subject of this piece. It is a triumph of subtlety and nerve.
Except that I’m wrong. I’ve been looking at the painting on its side and forming a completely inaccurate impression. Oh well. I’m probably not the first. There is an unconfirmed story that this painting by Cézanne was hung sideways for thirty-one years in London’s National Gallery. The origin of this gossip is from the economist Oswald Toynbee Falk (1879–1972), who lays the blame at the feet of one of its trustees, John Hugh Smith, exactly the kind of person who would in those days have had a hand in such decisions. I can find no corroboration of the story, but I do hope it’s true.
Of course, an establishment as prestigious as the National Gallery would be unlikely to admit to such a galloping blunder. And anyway, as I’ve said, the sideways version has much to recommend it. If there’s a moral to this story, it’s surely that once we commit to an error of thinking for too long it can be mortifying to correct ourselves, particularly if public humiliation is to be the outcome.
It strikes me that the culture war is largely characterised by groups of intelligent people investing in delusional ideas with such gusto that to backtrack would be a kind of social death. One might sooner teach a mule to moonwalk than persuade a celebrity who has championed gender identity ideology to admit that human beings cannot change sex. After demonising women for insisting on single-sex spaces, making excuses for the medicalisation of healthy children, and encouraging the dismantling of gay rights – all in the name of progress – it must be tremendously difficult to admit that it was all for nothing.
For many, the response to being corrected is simply to deny there was any mistake at all and to double down. This is certainly the position of the Green Party, whose representatives are now wholeheartedly wedded to the absurd proposition that human beings have an innate gendered soul that can be misaligned from their body. Their supporters are even congratulating them for their doggedness in the face of reason and evidence, so there is no incentive to course-correct.
Andrew Doyle, “The art of admitting our mistakes” ($), Andrew Doyle, 2026-05-08.
August 11, 2026
Cambridge has turned into a “Quality Learing Centre”
Even as I typed Sunday’s headline, I knew the fallout from the Jason Arday affair wasn’t going to be over quickly: it’s too high profile and gores far too many sacred cows to just fade out of the headlines. On his Substack, Francis Turner remembers what a Cambridge education used to mean and what progressive racists have turned it into now:
Once upon a time I was an undergraduate at Cambridge. Back in the day when men were real men, women were real women and Cambridge’s contribution to the national sense of humour were people like John Cleese, Tom Sharpe and Douglas Adams. Cambridge students were well aware that we were at the top of the intellectual tree and generally proud of the fact. In fact for many of us (e.g. your humble correspondent) coming to Cambridge was where we discovered that there were people far far smarter than we were for pretty much the first time in our lives. It was humbling. And once we got over that, exhilarating. You could have discussions about quantum mechanics or code optimizations or whatever with people who understood the concepts at least as well as you did. You could be lectured by professors who had Fields Medals or Nobel Prizes; often they had literally written the standard text book in the field. Sometimes they would drop digs about colleagues or rivals and you had to know that “Tony” was Tony Hoare who was in charge of Computer Science at the slightly inferior other place. And so on. Yes it was elitist. I’d say it was proudly so. Yes there were concerns about there being too many Old Etonians and other “public school”1 students compared to those from state schools but the solution was seen as going out to state schools and ruthlessly headhunting the top students rather than putting a cap on the number of privately educated students.
Some forty years later it seems that Cambridge no longer aspires to such intellectual heights — at least not for some areas of study. It is true that back then we generally held the Education Department and the associated students of Homerton College to be at a slightly lower level of intellect — and since they were mostly of the female persuasion many male chauvinist jokes were made at their expense. Also those of us reading for the more challenging degrees also disparaged some of the less challenging ones (sociology, land economy …) but even the most elitist MCPs agreed that even the ladies of Homerton had some intellectual assets to go along with what John Cleese might have called their attractive large tracts of land. However I doubt that even the ladies studying education back then would have put up with the quality of tuition offered today by professors such as J Arday, PhD.
However it isn’t just that the quality has gone down, what has also happened is that the racism, sexism and disableism has gone up at the same time as a deliberate part of the process. What do I mean by the racism etc. has risen?
Start with this excellent substack by Katy Barnett
You should read the whole thing because it is truly excellent, but the most relevant bit is this:
Arday’s appointment might make Arday’s enablers feel a righteous glow in the short term — “Look at how wonderful we are, we appointed a Black, disabled scholar!” — but when the web of falsehood disintegrates, it leads people to doubt the worth of all Black or disabled scholars more generally. It also does a disservice to all scholars and students at an institution. From what I have seen on social media, several former Cambridge graduates who had come from less advantaged backgrounds, and had worked exceptionally hard to be admitted, felt particularly betrayed.
I can understand this: they must feel that their hard work has been mocked. Instead of working so hard, why did they not embroider a story of sadness and use that instead? I, too, have felt this bitterness. Am I fool for not using my disadvantage?
If you want to know my “lived experience” before you think I’m worth listening to, you can have it. I have suffered from cerebral palsy since birth, because I was born at 29 weeks — and yes, I have proof of this! — but I do not think that this is relevant to my academic work. […]
I do not think my disability is a reason to promote me, nor do I think it is a reason why I am better than other people. It is certainly not a reason why I am more worth listening to on questions of private law. […]
Just presuming that someone is worthwhile simply because he is Black and disabled and from a disadvantaged background is patronising. But so, too, is dismissing someone simply because he is Black and disabled and from a disadvantaged background. These two positions are two sides of the one coin: using a simple, superficial heuristic to decide worth, without looking at the reality.
The sole relevant consideration is does this person produce good work, and can they do what is needed? I worry that the coin may flip in society, and we’ll go to a position where women and those from minority or disadvantaged backgrounds are presumed to be worthless. If the academy continues on this path, they will produce the very thing they fear: a backlash against minorities.
This is bit at the end is exactly the problem. If you promote incompetents to positions they are not suited for because of their gender, race etc. then you inspire everyone to look at other people with the same gender, race etc. and wonder if they too are incompetent. This is not a philosophical point, it is a real practical issue. I know people, some of whom read this substack, who make a conscious choice of choosing the older, white, male doctor if they can because they can be sure that this doctor was not given a helping hand due to his gender, race etc. and that therefore he will be more likely to give correct medical treatment.
Medicine is far from the only field where this is the case. You may recall the DC crash in early 2025 where a female helicopter pilot collided with a jet. There was a lot of commentary wondering whether (or outright saying that) she was unqualified and only got the job because she was a woman of the right (i.e. left) political leaning. I don’t know whether that is true or not — from what I recall at least some of the so-called evidence against her turned out to be rubbish — but the fact that such commentary sounds plausible and the responses are mostly of the form “Sexist!!!” with no evidence provided makes my point. Likewise the Florida university bridge collapse where the primary engineering firm was all female and (IIRC) Hispanic.
The fact that the phrase “DEI hire” exists and that everyone knows that a DEI hire is known to be less capable is the result of this racist behavior. And I do in fact mean racist. To quote Katy again:
In fact, their attitude strikes me as profoundly racist and not in the least “progressive”. The subtext is, “Black and disabled people can’t manage it, let’s turn a blind eye to any flaws and let this guy in anyway, so we can look good.”
This is the soft bigotry of low expectations.
- i.e. private, boarding school
How the Royal Navy’s budget cuts built foreign navies
Warships & Warriors
Published 10 Apr 2026When the United Kingdom’s Ministry of Defence faces a budget crisis, the rest of the world goes shopping. Welcome to Warships And Warriors! Today, we are exploring the global “Ghost Fleet” of the Royal Navy.
Through decades of cyclic Strategic Defence Reviews, the UK has repeatedly cut its fleet, selling off highly capable surface combatants, submarines, and massive amphibious assault ships decades before the end of their mechanical lifespans. In this video, we track down these decommissioned British warships to see how middle-power navies in South America, Eastern Europe, and Southeast Asia have transformed them.
From Brazil snapping up the Royal Navy’s amphibious heavyweights like HMS Ocean (now the Atlântico) and HMS Bulwark, to Chile bolting advanced missile systems onto ex-British Type 22 and Type 23 frigates, we uncover how foreign navies are gaining massive frontline capabilities at bargain prices. We also look at the strategic transfers of Upholder-class submarines to Canada, armed patrol vessels in Bangladesh, and the legally complex deployment of Sandown-class minehunters in the Black Sea.
0:00 – The Royal Navy Fire Sale
01:16 – Chapter 1: The Amphibious Heavyweights (Brazil)
04:31 – Chapter 2: The Frigates (Brazil, Chile & Romania)
07:16 – Chapter 3: The Submarines (Canada)
08:36 – Chapter 4: The Offshore Upgrades (Bangladesh & Philippines)
10:27 – Chapter 5: Clearing the Minefields (Lithuania, Greece, Ukraine & Estonia)
13:01 – Chapter 6: Mapping the Deep (Bangladesh)
13:48 – The Wrap-Up & The Tragic Fate of the Type 22 Batch 3
(more…)
August 10, 2026
Clarkson’s Farm (and seven subsidiary businesses)
While I don’t watch much TV outside the NFL season, I was certainly aware of Jeremy Clarkson’s post-Top Gear/post-The Grand Tour TV show, I only started actually watching it earlier this week. And that was only because of a glowing review from The Critical Drinker. I’ve been missing a really good show, but I’ve got four-and-a-half seasons to catch up on — I’m not a binge watcher, so that’s not going to happen immediately. On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, Sama Hoole points out just how tenuous a farming business can be in England nowadays and how many other businesses Clarkson has started on his farm to try to make it profitable:
Jeremy Clarkson of Clarkson’s Farm.
Jeremy Clarkson runs at least eight businesses off a thousand acres in Oxfordshire. Seven of them make money.
Count them. A farm shop. A pub. A lager brand. A bestselling book every autumn. A streaming series. A merchandise range. And now an app, built by Lisa Hogan, connecting the public to farms.
Then the eighth. Growing food.
Year one, working the ground flat out: £144. By year six, a £5,000 loss where £37,000 had been projected. This summer, two hundred of those acres grew nothing at all, because putting wheat in them was a guaranteed loss before the drill left the shed.
Every enterprise on that farm turns a profit except the farming.
The lager tells you why, and the chain of cause is on the record. Government subsidies were falling, so in 2021 he decided to brew beer from his own barley. That is the entire origin of Hawkstone. A decision taken in Whitehall turned an arable farmer into a brewer, and the beer worked.
Nothing about the grain changed. Barley sold as barley goes at whatever the buyer offers that morning. Barley in a bottle goes at the price the man who grew it decides.
That one difference is the whole business.
The pub is the same move in bricks. A derelict barn nobody had wanted since 2013, bought for reportedly under a million, now with a queue. On the menu a sausage from his own pigs costs 74p against 18p for the imported version, and he absorbs that gap on every plate. The farm shop, meanwhile, is legally barred from selling food produced more than sixteen miles away, and still cannot keep up with demand.
Now look at what the farming has behind it that yours does not. One of the best land agents in England. A farm manager who has worked that ground since he was a teenager. An agronomist. A production company covering the costs. A queue down the lane. A name that sells anything it is printed on.
It loses money anyway.
And this is the ordinary arrangement, not an eccentric one. Defra’s own figures say 72 percent of farms in England now take income from something that is not farming, and diversification accounts for 31 percent of total farm income. The government’s own Batters Review found nearly a third of British farms were loss-making outright in 2024.
Diddly Squat is simply the loudest version. The shop subsidises the field. The pub subsidises the field. The television subsidises the field.
A thousand acres of English farmland, and the one thing it cannot do is pay for itself by producing food.
Was Canada’s Victoria-class submarine deal a massive procurement failure?
Dominion Defence Review
Published 8 Aug 2026Plagued by chronic low availability while also being expensive to maintain, the purchase of used British submarines seems to be a good reminder that a low sticker price isn’t everything …
August 9, 2026
Hopefully the last word on “L’affaire Arday”
On her Substack, Helen Dale discusses the recently resigned Cambridge professor Jason Arday, the people who positioned him to fail, and what their motivations were in doing so:
Arday’s arrival to take up his professorship at Cambridge was recorded by at least two BBC cameras. Here he is talking to Hilary Cremin, head of the Faculty of Education at Cambridge.
Sometimes both institutions and people pick up a firearm and blow both feet off.
Cambridge University has done so with its gross mismanagement of the Jason Arday affair.
Oceans of ink have been spilt already on this issue, so I’m not going to relitigate the main background. Instead, I want to make four observations, in no particular order.
1. Oh, the humanities (and social sciences)
The problems across these two large disciplinary areas long predate the idiotic wokery that got Jason Arday appointed to a professorial chair at Britain’s second oldest, second most famous university. Yes, wokery has made them worse, chiefly because the theoretical frameworks animating it — which Lorenzo Warby has written about both here and at his own place — deny the possibility of truth outside that of personal experience. This means people don’t just get their own opinions, they also get their own facts.
[…]
2. Nathan Cofnas is not racist
There are two distinct things going on in the background to the Arday appointment(s). The first is that he was appointed despite being a complete doofus and as dumb as a stump. The second is that while there probably are black candidates out there qualified to be a Cambridge professor, there won’t be many, and they are highly unlikely to be the descendants of slaves (from the Caribbean, the United States, or South America). They’re much more likely to be from a posh Nigerian background, and a particular Nigerian tribe (Igbo).
In the words of computer scientist Eric S. Raymond:
This is completely predictable to anyone who has spent 10 minutes reviewing the data on racial differences in mean IQ and knows what that implies for the right end of the bell curve.
The intersection set of people with predominantly sub-Saharan African ancestry with people sufficiently bright to deserve a university professorship is not empty, but it’s vanishingly small. The demand greatly exceeds the supply.
Which is why we’ve seen this movie many times before, and will again. They can’t help it. Corrupted academia would rather hire thousands of other incompetents than let go of its “anti-racism” to hire on merit alone.
The refusal to grapple with the black-white average IQ gap is astounding, and while the (mostly) white people responsible for appointing Arday look like absolute fools, the black intellectuals who refuse to accept an established fact look both truculent and dishonest. They don’t have to accept it’s genetic. They do have to accept that it’s real. As far as I’m aware, only one major black intellectual, Wilfred Reilly, accepts the existence of the gap (disclosure: I have been a guest on Wilfred’s podcast). If there are others, I would be delighted to know their names.
Two issues fall out of this. The first is that Nathan Cofnas is not racist for pointing it out. Facts are not racist. The second is that if people disagree with Cofnas’s secondary argument that the reason for the gap is primarily genetic, then yelling racist! at him does not prove him wrong. Evidence is what you need if you want to prove someone wrong, not moral abuse.
3. It’s the rule of law, Jim, but not as we know it
The idea that historically disadvantaged groups are entitled to extra civil rights — coupled with social preferment — over and above those held/enjoyed by people considered their oppressors is inimical to the rule of law, specifically the principle that people should not be punished for crimes they did not commit. We do not inherit criminality from our ancestors. This is in turn derived from the larger principle of treat like cases alike, which was first articulated in its modern form by the Roman jurist Ulpian.
Jason Arday got his job in large part because a lot of people — and especially humanities and social science academics — think it’s reasonable to punish whites (and sometimes East Asians) who have never wronged blacks by making it harder for them to get into university or gain employment. This punishment of whites/East Asians who have done no wrong is undertaken to compensate blacks who have not been wronged for wrongs committed by other white people against other black people in the past. This logic is the basis of all affirmative action schemes and preferential hiring regimes (provision for which exists — albeit in limited form — in the UK’s Equality Act 2010). It is also the logic of inherited vengeance.
[…]
4. Enter Carter-Ruck, or Journalism v. Law v. a bloke with a blog
It’s been widely — and accurately — reported that junior academic Nathan Cofnas broke the Jason Arday story on his personal blog. However, it shouldn’t have been his job to do. The same (or very similar) research had been done separately by both a retired academic (John Harris) and a journalist with Times Higher Education — an outlet dedicated to the tertiary education sector and owned, ultimately, by Rupert Murdoch. In response to both sets of revelations, either Cambridge or Arday or perhaps both in concert (this is unclear on the facts available to me) instructed Carter-Ruck, the most famous — and aggressive — specialist defamation law firm in the United Kingdom. Historically, Private Eye magazine (often a victim of their attention) referred to them as “Carter-Fuck” and, more recently, “Farter-Fuck”.
Despite the fact that the THE has libel insurance and Murdoch generally defends his publications, the magazine backed down. Jack Grove is the reporter who had his story spiked. I have it on good authority that several Cambridge academics — and perhaps people from other universities — then approached Cofnas with the material that they (and possibly the THE) had collated. Cofnas — being young & junior — is what lawyers call “a man of straw”. Suing him in defamation would benefit no-one, least of all Carter-Ruck. He published, scooping Jack Grove.
How To Launch the Apocalypse – Death of Democracy 27 – Q3 1939
World War Two and Spartacus Olsson
Published 8 Aug 2026This is Step 27 in the Death of Democracy: LAUNCH A WORLD WAR — the moment when the collapse of democracy, diplomacy, and collective security culminated in an attack that would engulf the world.
In July and August 1939, Adolf Hitler turned the destruction of German democracy into the instrument for launching a European war.
While Nazi Germany armed Danzig, mobilized reservists, prepared its U-boats, introduced civilian rationing, and manufactured stories of Polish aggression, Britain, France, Poland, the United States, and the Soviet Union made a final series of increasingly desperate attempts to prevent catastrophe.
At the center of the crisis was the failed effort to construct an Anglo-French-Soviet alliance against Nazi aggression. Negotiations foundered on delay, mutual suspicion, the Baltic states, and the Soviet demand for military passage through Poland. Stalin then chose an agreement with Hitler: the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact and its secret protocol divided Eastern Europe into German and Soviet spheres of influence and prepared the way for the destruction of Poland.
Inside Germany, there was little repetition of the supposed national enthusiasm of August 1914. Nazi leaders and Wehrmacht commanders ranged from confidence and opportunism to anxiety and fatalism, while many ordinary Germans feared that Hitler had finally pushed Europe beyond the point of no return. Yet propaganda, repression, and six years of dictatorship had stripped the population of any effective means of preventing the war.
The next episode will conclude the series with an epilogue examining what the destruction of the Weimar Republic teaches us about defending democracy today.
August 8, 2026
Pointing the finger of blame accurately
The Librarian of Celaeno wants you to know that former professor Jason Arday did nothing wrong:
Former Cambridge professor Jason Arday
Image from Andrew Doyle
Once upon a time, an autistic black child was born. Usually, it takes several years to figure that out (the autism, not the blackness), but so autistically autistic was the infant Jason Arday that it was immediately apparent to everyone without there even needing to be any public record of it. Perhaps there is some lost evidence of him having a Reddit account as a toddler; one can speculate. Arday was unable to talk until age 11 and has been unable to stop talking ever since, which is fortunate since otherwise many of his unbelievable life accomplishments would now be unknown.
The range of setbacks he has overcome boggles the mind. Despite being illiterate until age 18, Arday not only graduated high school, but got into college, where he finally learned how to read good. This is even more incredible when you consider that the same year he discovered what the alphabet did he was beaten into epilepsy by random teens — he forgave them so thoroughly that any documentation of the incident is now gone from police records — and that some unspecified time before that he was in a car accident that left him in a waking coma for months. He studied so hard in college that he gave himself a brain tumor, which he evidently removed by himself in the mirror, since there is no evidence of a surgeon having done so. It may be that Arday has in fact learned to read several times in his life, but keeps getting that knowledge erased by semiannual episodes of CTE.
Even though he’d accumulated a substantial amount of what for a normal person would be crippling physical trauma over the course of his short time in the world, of the sort that would require medical interventions that would otherwise severely limit active life, Arday rapidly became one of the world’s most elite athletes. He participated in a ‘30 Marathons in 35 Days’ challenge, which was actually somewhat documented by an independent contemporary account, in the midst of which he suffered a hairline fracture in his fibula, which he seemingly just shrugged off to complete the remaining nine marathons. This was apparently the last time he ran slowly enough for anyone to witness, however, because his career as an ultramarathon runner who hyperGogginsed his way through 600 miles in six days passed entirely without notice by the few other people on Earth who could conceivably do that. He played semi-professional soccer, but was so good that he got bored with it and moved on before anyone could write his name down on a roster. Along the way, Arday became one of the best snooker players in Britain, with a skill level far beyond the need to participate in any public tournaments, other than the single amateur contest he entered but was too gracious to the other players to win.
He surmounted the intellectual challenges involved in becoming a PE teacher, and from there went on to earn a Ph.D as a black man, with his thesis largely consisting of arguing that it’s easier to do well in academia if you’re not closely supervised. It was so convincing a premise that his doctoral committee at Liverpool University evidently forewent actually reading the dissertation, perhaps also having concluded that his proximity to their whiteness had burdened him enough already. It was thus that Dr. Arday came into being, following a path blazed by Ibram X. Kendi as a bedredlocked black man writing about being black while being black blackly in a world basically controlled by the bad guys in Caddyshack.
On Substack Notes, Michael Southon also points the finger at the people who enabled Arday’s rise and attributed racist beliefs to anyone who asked questions:
Arday’s arrival to take up his professorship at Cambridge was recorded by at least two BBC cameras. Here he is talking to Hilary Cremin, head of the Faculty of Education at Cambridge.
Cambridge University was so proud of its choice of Jason Arday that they invited the BBC to film Hilary Cremin, the head of Cambridge University’s Faculty of Education, welcoming Arday to his new post. In the clip you can hear Cremin gushingly tell Arday:
We are so lucky to have you. You are the best in the world in terms of the research that you do.
Arday himself is incredulous and suggests that some people will see his appointment as “tokenistic”. In response, Cremin assures him he is “world class”.
The Telegraph reports that when Arday’s students complained that they weren’t being properly supervised, they were told they were being “racist”.
The truth is that Cambridge was desperate to appoint more people of colour. His alleged autism ticked another box on the identity politics agenda. The dreadlocks were icing on the cake.
Will this episode, which has been reported around the world, finally convince the establishment that DEI is a disastrous social policy that lowers standards and turns august institutions whose reputations are based on centuries of meritocracy into the laughing stock of the world?
I doubt it.
Also on Substack Notes, GenX Anecdotes finds the behaviour of Hilary Cremin to be emblematic of a kind of condescending attitude found most frequently among liberal white women:
We know the type.
And it does tend to be a woman.
They love nothing more than to put on that awful softy, patronising voice, as if talking to a small child.
I am reminded of that excrutiating clip of Hilary Cremin (Head of Cambridge University’s Faculty of Education) “You are the best in the world in terms of the research that you do“.
Really? “The best in the world”?
Like the bestest in the whole big wide world ever! 😂
I’m surprised she didn’t lean in and give him a pat on the head.
Wtf?
And that tone. 😭
It’s bad enough when they do it to kids.
I have posted about this “tone” before.
Near where I live there’s a Waitrose. The spiritual home of such a woman.
There used to be a Muslim woman wearing a hijab who would beg for money outside. I never gave her money because she seemed fake to me.
Always clean and well presented with the latest new iPhone (!), she would look up from her phone when she saw someone approaching, visibly completely change her facial expression, tilt her head to one side in a kind of puppy dog, “poor me” way, and put on a kind of fake whimpering “please help me!” and hold her hand out.
It was so obviously fake af!
One day I was waiting outside the shop for my daughter who had run in to get something.
As I waited, these two middle class, middle aged women stopped to talk to her.
They were both fawning over her, using that same softy patronising tone, falling over themselves to praise her. One of them said “you’re so beautiful and brave” and the other put her arm around her.
It was such a sychophantic display of patronising bullshit, I think I might have thrown up a little bit in my mouth.
This pathological sickly, performative fawning over their little pet minority groups, is something to behold!
And they were both being played.
This beggar wasn’t homeless. So obviously! You’d have to be a special kind of stupid to think so.
But they really are a special kind of stupid.
They just wanted to feel good about themselves. It’s all about their need to feel like they’re “good kind people”.
Then, no doubt make a FB post about it so all their other annoying cloying phoney friends can “coo” over how much they adore their little darling minority pets.
🤮
August 7, 2026
Blood Dawn by Hans van de Ven
On his Substack, Dr. Robert Lyman reviews a new book on the Second World War in Asia by Hans van de Ven:
I really wanted to enjoy this book. The enthusiastic endorsements from Rana Mitter, Antony Beevor and Richard Overy raised my expectations considerably. Yet by page eight of Blood Dawn I felt as uncomfortable as the proverbial curate confronted with a rotten egg.
The author aims to provide a narrative that “contributes to a gradual shift in our understanding of the significance of World War II”. This is admirable. A more Asian-centred interpretation of the conflict is certainly needed, as the war is still too often viewed through a Eurocentric or North Atlantic lens. Historians such as Rana Mitter, Jonathan Fennell and Richard Overy have already helped redress this imbalance. It is unquestionably true that the conflict began with Japanese aggression in China as early as 1931 and that the war both began and ended in Asia.
The problem is that the book insists that the central dynamic of modern Asian history is a nationalist struggle to escape imperialism and colonialism. While both undeniably shaped Asia, it is a considerable stretch to explain the region’s political development primarily through resistance to empire. The author correctly notes that many Asian political movements saw the war as an opportunity to cast off colonial rule, but he greatly overstates their role in determining the war’s outcome.
Consequently, the analysis neglects the broader dynamics of power – local, regional and imperial – that shaped Asia before, during and after the war. The author assumes that modern Asia is the product of “Asian peoples’ continuing struggle to overcome the legacies of empire”. That seems reductive. A more convincing interpretation would describe modern Asia to be the result of a power-based confrontation among declining powers such as Britain, France and the Netherlands, a rising Japan, a developing China, and the emerging superpowers whose ideologies would shape postwar Asia: the United States and the Soviet Union. The war was principally caused by one rising empire, Japan, seeking to assert its dominance regionally and to replace existing empires.
As a result, some empires disappeared, others expanded, and many colonial territories gained independence as competing political elites seized opportunities created by wartime upheaval. Where those struggles could not be resolved peacefully, civil war followed. One may call this nationalism or self-determination, but it was power politics nonetheless.
In the postwar period, Asians were often less concerned with abolishing imperial legacies than with creating new centres of power controlled by local elites. Since 1945, Asia has been shaped by competing powers, some imperial in nature, such as China, the Soviet Union/Russia and the United States, and others nationalist and local.
A similar lack of nuance appears in the treatment of imperialism. British imperialism is lumped together with that of France and the Netherlands, with little appreciation for their differences. British involvement in 19th-century China is presented primarily as the cause of China’s problems rather than as part of a broader interaction with a declining and dysfunctional Qing polity. Imperialism was certainly influential, but so were domestic developments, including China’s internal sclerosis and Japan’s response to modernity, which produced its own imperial ambitions in China, Korea, Manchuria and the Pacific.
The author’s ideological predispositions are impossible to miss, and the book frequently descends into crude Anglophobia. We are told, for instance, that “British elites, who liked (and like) to think of themselves as natural and gifted rulers, found a new outlet for their yearning to govern India”. Such statements are simplistic, if not puerile. Similarly, discussing the collapse of the American-British-Dutch-Australia Command (ABDACOM) in 1942, the author remarks that “the Dutch were abandoned to their fate. Retreat is an underappreciated military skill, and the British were practiced masters of it, as they had shown at Dunkirk”. This is the sort of cheap point-scoring that would weaken an undergraduate essay, yet here it appears in a supposedly serious work of history.
The treatment of India is particularly problematic. The narrative focuses heavily on the Indian National Congress and consequently overlooks the diversity and complexity of the independence movement. There is little recognition that what Congress often described as British obstruction was, in part, a debate within Britain (especially the Conservative Party) about the form an independent India should take. The same debate also took place within Indian circles considering the subject.
During the 1920s and 1930s, the central political question in India was often not whether independence would occur but what form it would take and, crucially, who would benefit from it. The Quit India movement of 1942 followed the Cripps Mission, which had already offered India Dominion status after the war. Congress sought immediate separation, but many of its leaders privately supported the Allied war effort, believing correctly that victory would hasten independence. One could even argue that Congress’s greatest unintended achievement was not independence but the partition and communal violence that accompanied it. The book fails to engage adequately with these complexities.
Brexit plus ten
Mark Nayler looks at the state of Britain ten years after the historic vote to leave the European Union. He notes that there appears to be a bit of buyer’s remorse among those who voted to leave the EU, although I would note that the political leadership, both Conservative and Labour, almost all did their level best to sabotage any positive results (although the “Boriswave” of immigrants would have swamped even a substantial economic boom all by itself).
In the run-up to the UK’s referendum on EU membership in June 2016, extravagant claims were made by both the Remain and Leave campaigns. Leaving the EU, the so-called Remainers warned, would propel the UK into recession and mass unemployment. Brexiteers, as they were dubbed, countered with promises of enhanced sovereignty, tighter borders, and liberation from Brussels’s stifling bureaucracy. The latter won the Brexit vote (as it came to be known) by 52% to 48%. But just over a decade on from that historic decision — and six and a half years since the UK officially left the bloc — it’s less clear whether they also won the argument.
This is in large part because of geopolitical turmoil since the vote. Throughout the last decade, there has been a global pandemic, Russia has launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine (which, in turn, caused an energy crisis across Europe), and Donald Trump has waged a series of tariff wars across the world. The difficulty of disentangling the effects of these events on the UK economy from those caused by Brexit is formidable. One analyst has even said that “we will never know precisely what the impacts of Brexit were”.
Overall, however, the sweeping transformations predicted by both Brexiteers and Remainers — positive in the former case, negative in the latter — have not occurred. The actual changes have been less dramatic, more gradual, and more mixed than either side forecast. One also has to factor in the UK’s lack of a stable leadership since the vote: when Labor’s Andy Burnham took over from Keir Starmer on July 20, he became the UK’s 7th prime minister in 10 years. This, perhaps, has so far prevented the theoretical autonomy now possessed by the UK from being fully realized. According to a poll conducted in June, 57% of Britons now believe that it was a mistake to leave the EU — meaning there are a lot of dissatisfied Brexiteers out there.
Remainers forecast economic ruin for the UK if it chose to leave the EU. According to the then-Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne, “A vote to leave would represent an immediate and profound shock to our economy [and] that shock would push our economy into a recession”. A recession failed to materialize, although the pound suffered its biggest-ever one-day drop on June 24, 2016, the day after the vote, falling 10% against the dollar and 7% against the euro (it still hasn’t returned to its pre-Brexit values against either currency, although Trump’s tariff wars and the pandemic are also factors here). That said, researchers broadly agree that Britain’s economy has contracted due to Brexit. According to a 2025 paper for the US National Bureau of Economic Research, UK GDP per capita is 6–8% lower than it would have been had the UK remained in the EU. Investment is down by 12–13%, employment by 3–4%, and productivity has been reduced by about 4%, according to its authors.
Immigration was a major theme of the Leave campaign. The UK Independence Party’s widely criticized poster showed a large group of Syrian refugees at the Croatia–Slovenia border in 2015, next to a massive slogan reading “Breaking Point” — and, underneath it, in smaller letters, “The EU has failed us all”. The center-right party was playing to concerns about a surge in migration over the decade and a half preceding the referendum, triggered by EU enlargements in 2004,when ten new countries joined, and in 2007. In 2000, migration to the UK from other EU countries stood at 6,000, but by 2015 it had risen to 330,000. In 2015 and 2016 alone, more than a million migrants arrived in Britain. According to a poll conducted on the day of the referendum, 33% of Leave voters said the main reason for their decision was a belief that leaving the EU “offered the best chance for the UK to regain control over immigration and its own borders”. It seems the poster had done its job.
The composition of Britain’s migrant population has changed radically since Brexit, with an increase in non-EU migration more than compensating for the reduction in arrivals from the EU. But immigration has not decreased. In fact, the UK has witnessed record levels of immigration over the last decade. In the year ending March 2023, just over three years after Britain’s withdrawal from the bloc, net migration peaked at 944,000.
August 6, 2026
More threads unravelling from Professor Jason Arday’s backstory
As I mentioned the other day when I first noted this fascinating tale, I don’t think I’d heard of Professor Jason Arday before this week, so pretty much any new facets of the story will be news to me. Here’s an extensive survey of what’s been revealed so far by Donna Louise Flowers:
Cambridge professor Jason Arday
Image from Andrew Doyle
Cambridge Knew in 2023
On 19 May 2023 Martyn Hammersley emailed Hilary Cremin, Head of the Faculty of Education, and Rhys Morgan, Head of Policy. He flagged substantial plagiarism in Arday’s 2018 paper, including quotes attributed to Arday’s own interview subjects that matched quotes from another researcher’s participants. (emails first reported by Nathan Cofnas and later confirmed in The Telegraph)
On 21 June 2023 Morgan replied that it was “not within our remit”. Cremin said Arday had the department’s full support.
That is three years of Cambridge knowing. Everything that followed sits on top of that decision.
In the BBC’s 2023 video marking his appointment, Cremin went further. She said: “We are so lucky to have you. You are the best in the world in terms of the research that you do.” (BBC video, 2023)
Eight months later, on 2 February 2024, Arday was appointed to ITV’s Cultural Advisory Council. Sixteen months after the concerns were raised, on 19–20 September 2024, he led sessions on equity, diversity and inclusion at the National Aspiring Vice Chancellor Development Programme at Bolton.
He was teaching the next generation of vice-chancellors while the questions about his own record remained unanswered by the institution that employed him.
[…]
The Claims, Laid Out Together
Here, in one place, is the full set of claims Jason Arday has made about his life:
- Diagnosed with autism and global developmental delay at the age of three.
- Non-verbal until the age of eleven.
- Unable to read or write until the age of eighteen.
- Four to five hours of speech therapy every day from the age of three.
- A mother with five degrees.
- A benign brain tumour removed a fortnight before his PhD viva, which wiped his memory of the entire thesis; he re-learned it and still passed.
- Two further brain tumours diagnosed after the PhD, later found to be benign.
- Deaf in one ear.
- Ran 30 marathons in 35 days, the last nine after sustaining a hairline fracture that made his leg swell to twice its normal size.
- Covered 300 miles in three days.
- Covered 600 miles in six days (later quietly amended in some citations to twelve days).
- Raised £5.5 million for more than 80 charities.
- Installed water points in South America and West Africa with WaterAid.
- Received a severed pig’s head at his parents’ home.
- Faced a knife-wielding masked man.
- Received bullets in the post, rape threats against his daughter, threats to make him “top himself”, and other forms of intimidation including corrosive substances and mutilated animals.
- Came through a professional football club’s academy system and later played semi-professionally.
- Was on the verge of turning professional at snooker.
- Awarded an MBE in 2017 and turned it down.
- Olympic Torch Bearer for London 2012.
- Appeared in the ITV documentary series Seven Up!
- Obtained a Masters degree in “psychodynamic practice” from Birkbeck and became a qualified counsellor.
- Held visiting professorships at the University of Glasgow and Ohio State University.
This is the origin story as it has been told. Almost none of it has been independently verified. Several of the most dramatic claims have been directly contradicted by the organisations or records that should corroborate them.
That is the real failure.
In the rush to be diverse, to be inclusive, to champion a Black, autistic, working-class success story who ticked every box, almost no one stopped to ask the simplest question of all: when you look at these claims as a totality, how plausible are they?
Each claim on its own might have been given the benefit of the doubt. Taken together they form a pattern that should have been obvious long before Carter-Ruck letters and police complaints were required to shut the questions down.
The institutions that elevated the legend spent years repeating it. When the contradictions began to surface they did not investigate. They defended. They edited the websites quietly. They called the scrutiny a vile campaign. They treated the act of checking as the real offence.
Jason Arday did not need to invent a modest success story. He invented a legend. And for years almost no one dared to ask whether any of it was real — because he is Black, and in the current climate that was supposed to be enough.
It was not enough. And it never should have been.
Update: Reportedly after Cambridge opened an investigation into the plagiarism allegations, Professor Arday has submitted his resignation.
Jason Arday, who was touted as the university’s youngest black professor, announced on Wednesday that he was resigning effective immediately from both the university and Jesus College. His resignation came just hours after Cambridge had said it opened an investigation into the allegations after “new information” came to light.
In a statement published by the Good Law Project, Arday said that the “relentless accusations” had taken a “profound toll” on him. He added that he has decided to resign for his “own wellbeing”.
“I have tried to continue because I believe deeply in the values of higher education, in rigorous scholarship, and in the transformative power of universities. I have tried because of my students, my colleagues and the countless people who have written to tell me that my journey gave them hope,” he wrote. “But there comes a point when the personal cost becomes too great. I have a family. I want to be present for them. I want to reclaim some peace, some privacy and some semblance of an ordinary life. I no longer wish to feel as though I am living under a constant spotlight, where every aspect of my life is subject to public examination and judgement.”
The next shoe was funny enough that I assumed it was from the Babylon Bee, but apparently is not parody:
Following Arday’s resignation letter, social media users claimed that the statement itself appeared to have been AI-generated. According to Panagran, the leading AI writing detection software, Arday’s resignation statement was deemed to be 100 percent AI-generated.
Frederick Alexander decrys the fools that bought Arday’s fantastic stories as nothing but the truth and moved mountains to get him advancement at all costs:
The main entrance of Jesus College, Cambridge from Jesus Lane.
Photo by Verbcatcher via Wikimedia Commons.
We may never know the full extent of Jason Arday’s talents. Perhaps he also sang the difficult half of Milli Vanilli, crossed the Atlantic on a lilo with a shattered pelvis, and designed the SpaceX rocket catcher in the margins of his PhD thesis. There is, in truth, no claim he could have made that the intellectual class would not have believed, provided it flattered their view of themselves as good and righteous people.
Did it not occur to him that someone might check? Confronted by the Guardian, Arday has since offered a defence that will live on his Wikipedia page forever despite the efforts of its editors: “To be honest with you, I thought you’d just believe me. Why would I lie?”
It’s probably the most honest thing he’s ever said. More importantly, it describes the workings of his career in the sort of plain language that the sociology department hadn’t quite trained out of him. He thought the Guardian class would believe him because he understood that they wanted to believe him. They were falling over themselves to grant legitimacy to anything he said simply because he was the one saying it. His story bore out their politics, advertised their virtue and bolstered their status. Scrutiny would only spoil the party.
Perhaps this explains why Arday’s writing also got a pass. Here, for instance, is Arday explaining … well, you figure it out.
As the researcher, textual units concerning the narratives and biographies were identified based on the criteria that the identified themes were fit for purpose in supporting the themes associated with the study.
You would get more sense from a gibberish generator. Academic writing is hell at the best of times, but sociology has mumbo-jumbo built in. Banalities disappear beneath layers of abstraction presumably in an effort to make them sound deep or insightful. Next to this, the plagiarism comes as a relief, another person’s sentences at least making the effort to mean something.
The writing should be disqualifying by itself, but it’s not like Arday tiptoed into the academy while nobody was looking. Cambridge signed him up in the manner of a Premier League football team landing the next Ronaldo, but on the strength of highlight reels that turned out to be AI-generated.
The remarkable thing is not merely that Arday appears to have invented stories about himself. Lots of people do that. I did it when I was nine, trying to convince people I was invisible. Nobody appointed me to a professorship at one of the country’s most prestigious universities. Or rather, formerly prestigious universities. Who can look at these institutions now and not see the wreckage of ideological capture?
They’re calling the fallout “a vile campaign” to undermine Arday’s credibility – of course they are. It’s a smear by “right-wing newspapers” intended to embarrass Arday and those who elevated him. Of course it is. But the embarrassment was born of their own vanity and gullibility. They demanded that everyone believe the story, then labelled anyone who checked it as morally suspect and worthy of a police investigation.
Nearly 15,000 people have signed an open letter declaring the allegations “entirely false”, even as the evidence points the other way. How long before they withdraw their names, reframe events and reposition themselves as the full truth comes to light? Soon they will talk solemnly about the importance of integrity, dissociate themselves entirely from Arday – yesterday a useful idiot, today a serious liability – and somehow still make it about race and right-wing bigotry. This stuff is hardcoded. The rest is just presentation.
The administrators who made the appointment will survive with a few bruises, scapegoating Arday until the media get bored of it. Then they’ll pick up where they left off, a little more careful next time – running the checks, scouring the next candidate’s PhD for plagiarism, testing every fantastical claim against reality, except where reality conflicts with ideology. Which is likely most of it.
QotD: John Nicholson, a Muslim saint who really hated India
[…]
[The First Anglo-Afghan War (1838-1842)] began with the British efforts to replace Afghan Emir Dost Muhammad with a more pliant leader, which in a pattern seen from the days of Alexander onward, involved an invasion, an attempt at a pacification, followed by a grim and growing awareness that the place is full of some of the most brutal and fractious people on Earth and is simply ungovernable, which terminates in a costly retreat, the country itself returning to its customary barbarism, efforts to change it having had all the effect of flinging an encyclopedia into a chimp enclosure. For the British, this meant early success, then an overwinter occupation in which their position deteriorated, then a mass uprising, whereupon they negotiated with the locals for a peaceful exit upon surrendering their arms. The retreating British were of course betrayed and massacred. One man made it out.
Nicholson, serving as an adjutant officer with a native regiment, had earlier been taken prisoner, and endured horrific conditions as such. He watched as his Hindu soldiers refused — to a man — to convert to Islam, and were executed one after the other. After having been released, he discovered that his younger brother Alexander had been murdered and mutilated by the Afghans while retreating with the rest of the army. The entire effort had been a great traumatic waste.
One might expect that Nicholson would hate the Afghans and perhaps revise upward his estimation of the brave Indian soldiers who had served under him. But while he did indeed revile the Pashtun tribesmen (“the most vicious and bloodthirsty race in existence”) he actually seems to have disliked them slightly less than the Hindus, perhaps on the grounds that no one that eager to kill Indians can be all bad. Indeed, he seems to have learned there some harsh lessons concerning what it would take to actually accomplish anything in the subcontinent, doctrines he would apply fastidiously and thoroughly. In many ways, he went a bit more native than he would have cared to admit.
After the war, Nicholson was promoted and given a series of administrative jobs, where he became well-acquainted with the chaotic political situation in the Punjab region. Mostly under the control of the Sikh Empire, the area had long been contested ground between that new faith and Islamic invasions from the Mughals to the southeast and the Afghans through the Khyber Pass to the west, not to mention restive Hindu Rajputs and Marathas to the south. The unstable (then and now) region of Kashmir lay to the north, and the whole of the region was plagued by innumerable bandits and warlords. The BEIC ruled through direct administration, client kings, and various alliances, the latter two of which its political officers (“politicals”) had to interact with on a regular basis. It was very much a situation out of George R. R. Martin’s fever dreams, constant betrayals, perversions of every kind, and even a Ramsey Bolton-esque Sikh despot who flayed men alive for amusement.
Nicholson was in charge of the Bannu area, where he rapidly made a name for himself as a local administrator. The whole of the Bannu was infested with bandits of all kinds, from jihadis to Hindu cultists to normal brigands, and the people lived in constant fear of their depredations. Nicholson had no real interest in bettering lives, but he had even less interest in allowing any Indian, anywhere, to challenge his authority. So he set about fixing the problem as only he could.
Nicholson arrested and executed scores of bandits, rapidly processing them through his very efficient court system. The idea of impartially dispensing justice without respect to person or affiliation was quite new to the area, but Nicholson made sure the locals adjusted quickly, tolerating not even the slightest hint of disrespect from anyone, no matter who he was. When a local Muslim leader casually spit on the ground in front of him, Nicholson made him kneel and lick it up. Anyone who failed to display prompt obedience to his commands he had flogged immediately, and was the bane of servants, who were often the causal recipients of hurled cups and dishes. He was a very hands-on leader, not the least hesitant to get them dirty in a quite literal sense. At one point, when his local police were unwilling to pursue a dangerous gang leader, Nicholson rode alone to the man’s village, approached him on the street, and killed him with his sword after the suspect failed to submit to arrest. Nicholson kept his severed head on his desk pour encourager les autres.
Interestingly, such draconian brutality seems to have actually made Nicholson popular. He was harsh, unyielding, and wholly indifferent to their culture, but that very indifference made him unassailable to anything but his sense of duty. He was unbribable, as the people of India had absolutely nothing he wanted, and his complete contempt for their social norms meant that Hindu, Muslim, or Sikh, Brahmin or outcast, Aryan or Dravidian, all got the exact same treatment, prompt and thorough. His mad fearlessness meant that he was similarly immune to threats. Criminals, whoever they were, received savage punishment, but the law-abiding were left in peace; Nicholson had no desire to “improve” them or their society like his contemporary Macaulay. In a real sense, for the first time, the diverse people of the area were free, under Nicholson’s rule, to live as they wished without the violent misery that had previously characterized the region. It was a multicultural success story, festooned with the occasional decapitated head.
This being India, the people expressed their feelings towards him in particular ways. A body of wild Pashtun raiders, admiring Nicholson’s capacity for ruthless violence and his grim charisma, attached themselves to him as a personal guard, fedaykin to his Muad’Dib, serving without pay and loyal only to him. In a theologically fecund area with a strong tradition of syncretism and cults of personality, Nicholson naturally became the object of worship for a group of fanatical devotees. He in turn naturally despised this, having his worshipers flogged as public nuisances, but this only served to increase their devotion to their inscrutable, violent deity. In some parts of India, the Cult of Nikal Seyn survived as a Shia devotional movement, with Nicholson cast as a Muslim saint bringing justice to a war torn land. The last member died in 2004.
Librarian of Celaeno, “The Man Who Hated India”, The Library of Celaeno, 2026-05-04.
