Look, I, like you, heard about how terrible the aftermath of WWI was, and how broke people were right after, and how they were moving to cities and living in tenements. It wasn’t until I was reading a book about the between the war period in England that I realized they were telling me TWO stories which couldn’t both have happened. In the part about the common folk, they were telling me how much poorer they were than before the war. In the part about the great families, they were telling me how the huge rise of the middle class and the building of suburbs had hurt them, and how the newly rich common folk no longer wanted to be servants.
That was one of those “wait a minute.” Sure I was taught both things in school, but you know you write down the bullet point for the test, and that’s it. Now I was going “Who the heck wrote these narratives and why doesn’t anyone question them?”
The truth, btw, from going to primary sources is closer to the second. And the people who wrote the narrative were the unseated noblemen, who did not like all these nouveau riche but who wanted to justify their disgust by showing how it hurt the poor. (It did increase the underclass somewhat, not because of economic conditions, but because a lot of men don’t integrate well after war, and well, WWI was something special by way of trauma.)
There are tons of these when you start poking. For instance the idea that the industrial revolution was unremittingly bad for the poor/people. Looking at China and India and such places right now, all I can do is roll my eyes.
Yeah, sure, the conditions of the early industrial revolution were appalling. And yet people crowded to the cities to take these jobs. What the historians never ask themselves is “How much worse was what they were escaping from?” We know that in India and China and other recently industrialized countries.
Sure the countryside has relatively clean air and more open space, but there are still real famines, and the work was unremitting and brutal and yes, little children worked too (says the daughter of middle class in a rural community whose first “job” was weeding the onion patch at five. And I was a pampered moppet. Kids my age from farming families had what we’d call full time jobs. Factory jobs at least had a stopping time.)
The idea that the industrial revolution was awful comes from upper class historians who could see the little kids twisted by working in the mills but who never consorted closely enough with the rural poor to see the misery behind raising baah lambs and the pretty pretty flowers.
Yeah. So the past isn’t written in stone. And it’s not a conspiracy. Not precisely a conspiracy. Yeah, sure, the Marxists influenced a lot of modern history with their ideas, but that is not necessarily conspiring. They view the world a certain way and it influences how they view the past too.
Sarah Hoyt, “How Do You Know?”, According to Hoyt, 2016-08-24.
May 9, 2018
QotD: The “you can’t get good help” period after WW1
May 8, 2018
Charge of the Light Brigade | Animated History
The Armchair Historian
Published on 28 Dec 2017The Charge of the Light Brigade, Animated History
QotD: Pay inequality
It probably doesn’t come as news that airline companies pay pilots more than cabin crew — but according to the dogma of the gender wage gap, we’re supposed to find this fact troubling. The British government now requires companies to report their raw gender gap — that is, the difference in the median hourly wages earned by their male and female employees. Ignoring occupational differences, seniority, employment history, hours worked, or any of the countless other factors affecting salaries, these data are misleading at best. Nevertheless, when budget airline EasyJet reported a 51 percent pay gap between its male and female employees, the company knew that its reputation perched on the edge of a PR abyss.
And that’s the whole point of the exercise: simplify statistics to shock people at the seeming injustice done to women and shame companies into action; refuse to compare similar job functions; ignore the fact that, like every other airline, EasyJet’s pilots are disproportionately male, while their cabin crews skew female; forget that almost all carriers compete for the same 4 percent of the world’s female pilots; and whatever you do, don’t mention that the EasyJet CEO, who was in charge of this bigoted organization and also its highest-paid employee until retiring earlier this year, was a woman. The company should be branded with a scarlet “51 percent” until it … does what? Cuts pilots’ pay? Hikes the salaries of female cabin crew? Hires male attendants instead of female? Goes bankrupt?
Kay S. Hymowitz, “Equal Pay Myths: Activists for wage parity ignore stubborn truths”, City Journal, 2018-04-09.
May 6, 2018
Tank Chats #29 Daimler Dingo Scout Car | The Tank Museum
The Tank Museum
Published on 21 Dec 2016The wheeled armoured scout car was the British Army’s principal reconnaissance vehicle from the beginning of World War II until the 1980s.
Scout cars were small and much quieter than a tracked vehicle; units equipped with scout cars relied on stealth to obtain information, rather than fighting for it. The Daimler Dingo entered service with the British Army in 1939 and served until the middle 1960s as a reconnaissance and liaison vehicle used by armoured and infantry divisions.
It was so versatile that a multitude of uses were found for it: medical officers used them to search for casualties in the battle field while one unit even issued a Dingo to its chaplain!
May 3, 2018
“[T]hose who cry ‘cultural appropriation’ are merely whingers with too much time on their hands”
Naomi Firsht rightly calls cultural appropriation “the ultimate first world problem”:
If ever there was an entirely invented problem, it is ‘cultural appropriation’. No one had even heard of it five years ago. Now it pops up in news stories on an almost weekly basis.
Mansfield College at Oxford University cancelled a cannabis-themed party a few weeks ago because some students feared it could lead to cultural appropriation. It seems some were concerned that the team organising the event drew on the music and culture of the Caribbean in its invitation.
That anyone could care so much as to complain about an event that encouraged students to ‘Get creative with puns’ for fancy-dress ideas – ‘Ganjalf’, ‘The Grim Reefer’ and ‘Ganja Claus’ were among the suggestions – is just sad.
The people most likely to denounce others for their “cultural appropriation” are also the ones most likely to suffer at the sight (or thought) of anyone having fun. They’re modern-day Puritans with tattoos, piercings, and multi-coloured hair.
Let’s be honest, those who cry ‘cultural appropriation’ are merely whingers with too much time on their hands. Not only is this a non-problem, it is also an inherently First World, middle-class problem. Just take a look at Teen Vogue’s article on this year’s Coachella – the annual music and arts festival held in California.
Writer Dillon Johnson complains about ‘appropriative fashion’ at the festival, including bindis, box braids and warbonnets. ‘It’s never okay to wear someone’s culture as a costume, especially not for the sake of getting double taps’, writes Johnson, before generously offering to ‘inform and educate those that are willing to learn’.
Considering a ticket to this year’s Coachella cost a minimum of $429 (and that’s before you’ve paid for accommodation, travel and food), it’s unlikey the festival-goers’ fashion choices will be of much importance to most people.
One of the greatest things about culture is its unifying power. One group borrowing cultural aspects of another is a sign of a diverse society that is proud and admiring of its many influences. As an Ashkenazi (of Eastern Europe descent) Jew, I take immense pleasure in hearing Yiddish words (the language of my grandparents and great-grandparents) being used so liberally in the US. You’d be hard pressed to find a New Yorker who doesn’t know words like schmuck, bubbe and chutzpah. And the liberal littering of Yiddish phrases in Hollywood films always makes me smile. It breathes new life into an old language.
The rage against cultural appropriation sucks the fun out of culture, and, even worse, encourages a new kind of segregation. We should encourage cultural sharing – it enriches our society. Only a schmuck would think otherwise.
May 1, 2018
Shooting a Suppressed Sten Gun
Forgotten Weapons
Published on 19 Mar 2018Sold for $7,475 (transferrable).
During World War Two, the British spent several years developing a silenced version of the Sten gun for special operations commandos and for dropping to mainland European resistance units. This is a recreation of one of the experimental types, based on a MkII Sten with the receiver lengthened into an integral suppressor. So – how does it shoot?
April 27, 2018
The First Tank-on-Tank Battle in History – The Zeebrugge Raid I THE GREAT WAR Week 196
The Great War
Published on 26 Apr 2018At Villers-Bretonneux, German and British tanks clash marking the first tank-on-tank battle in history. In the same week, the most successful flying ace of World War 1 is shot down over France: Manfred von Richthofen dies after scoring 80 victories. Meanwhile, the British Navy attempts to eliminate the German U-Boat threat with a daring raid on Zeebrugge and Ostende.
April 26, 2018
Britain drops down a league table that really matters, for a change
Mick Hume on the parlous state of press freedoms in Britain:
Britain prides itself on being an historic home of freedom and the free press. So how come we are languishing in 40th place in the international press-freedom table?
Imagine the crowds singing an updated version of Rule Britannia at the Last Night of the Proms, about how Britain ‘shall flourish great and free / The dread and envy of them all / Except for the 39 freer nations, obvs’.
According to the 2018 World Press Freedom Index, published on Wednesday by Reporters Without Borders (RSF), the UK is now ‘one of the worst-ranked countries in Western Europe in terms of respect for press freedom’.
Its 40th place puts the UK one ahead of Burkina Faso and two clear of Taiwan, and suggests that journalists working in Britain have less freedom to hold the powerful to account than those in such liberal states as South Africa, Chile or Lithuania.
British observers are far more likely to bemoan how far we have fallen down the world rankings in football, another field we claim to have invented. Unlike the glorious irrelevance of football, however, freedom of the press really is a matter of life and death for a democratic society.
The UK’s 40th place is unchanged from 2017. But that is 18 lower than its ranking in the first Index, published in 2002 – and 12 places down on six years ago, before the publication of the Leveson report.
That should give a clue as to the new threats press freedom faces in the UK. Unlike in some other illiberal parts of the world, we are not confronted by old-fashioned government repression and state control of the press. Instead, and especially since the Leveson Inquiry, press freedom in the UK has been threatened by a more underhand assault from allegedly liberal political and cultural elites – backed, to their shame, by the Labour Party leadership and the Corbynite left.
April 25, 2018
Tank vs. Tank: Villers-Bretonneux, April 1918 | The Tank Museum
The Tank Museum
Published on 20 Apr 2018100 years ago, during the First World War, tank fought tank for the first time in history, at Villers-Bretonneux on 24 April 1918.
It was an engagement that foreshadowed one hundred years of tanks fighting tanks on the battlefield, stories told by The Tank Museum.
April 24, 2018
The Windrush scandal in Britain
Brendan O’Neill discusses the bureaucratic idiocy that lead to thousands of people who’d been living and working in Britain are threatened with loss of jobs, loss of healthcare rights, and even deportation:
The Windrush scandal and its fallout might have exposed the incompetence of Theresa May and her political set. But it has done something far worse to Remainers. It has laid to waste their entire worldview. It has shattered their defining myth: that where they brave few are nice and pro-immigrant, the rest of the country, especially those little-educated inhabitants of ‘Brexitland’, are a seething pit of 1930s-style racism. In the palpable public discomfort with how the Windrush migrants have been treated, we see yet again what a libel this Remainer depiction of Brexit Britain has been.
For nearly two years, the liberal intelligentsia has talked about vast swathes of the electorate as a hateful throng whose prime motor is disgust with foreigners. These people yearn for a time when ‘faces were white’, says Vince Cable. The vote for Brexit was a ‘whitelash’, said Guardian columnist Polly Toynbee, which was quite the slur against the one in three ethnic-minority voters who chose Brexit. These mad voters just want ‘less foreign-looking people on their streets’, said Diane Abbott. The police churned out ridiculous hate-crime stats, using entirely subjective criteria to declare there had been an outpouring of violent hate after the referendum, and columnists lapped it up. Brexit Britain was divided between an enlightened elite that doesn’t care about skin colour or national origins and the fever-minded masses who apparently think about little else.
It was a lie, of course, as many of us argued, and as many more should now see in the wake of the Windrush scandal. With every revelation of the Home Office’s mistreatment of Caribbean migrants, public displeasure grows. People can see the grave injustice of treating as criminals people who have been here since the 1940s and 50s and who were given leave to remain by an act of law in 1971. The way these Britons have been thrown out of their jobs or deprived of NHS care or in some cases deported — because rules introduced when Theresa May was home secretary stipulate that all migrants must now have official documentation — has grated with the populace. This was reflected in a poll published by iMix and the Runnymede Trust last week, which found that 60 per cent of Britons, rising to 71 per cent for over-65s, are opposed to what the government has done to the Windrush people. Those same over-65s who for the past two years have been talked about as racist scum by the Remainer chattering classes.
The Remainer elites’ religious conviction that huge parts of Britain are little more than racist-mobs-in-waiting is falling apart, fast. Even before the public concern with the mistreatment of the Windrush generations, there was the survey carried out by Open Europe at the end of last year which challenged the idea that the vote for Brexit was a ‘mandate to pull up the drawbridge’. On the contrary, many Britons still see the value in migration — they simply want some say over it, they want it to be a democratic concern. Open Europe found ‘little evidence’ that this ‘desire to control immigration’ was driven by ‘racism or xenophobia’. Even the EU now accepts Britons are not horrible racists. Its attitudes survey found the proportion of Brits who are ‘very positive’ or ‘fairly positive’ about migrants rose from 43 per cent to 63 per cent over the past four years, which includes the post-Brexit period when we were supposedly taking to the streets to bash a foreigner.
April 20, 2018
Great Blunders of WWII: The Pilot Who Bombed London 3
Anthony Coleman
Published on 4 Nov 2016From the History Channel DVD series Great Blunders of WWII
April 17, 2018
The renewed controversy over Enoch Powell’s “Rivers of Blood” speech
In Spiked, Mick Hume discusses the resurgent controversy after a BBC re-broadcast of the original Powell speech this past weekend:
Here are the news headlines. There were no reports of race riots, pogroms or waves of hate crimes across Britain on Saturday night, as the BBC broadcast a radio show marking the 50th anniversary of Enoch Powell’s infamously anti-immigration ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech. In other news, the US, UK and France have bombed Syria…
Why all the overblown fuss about the BBC Radio 4 programme that broadcast the full text of Powell’s 1968 speech for the first time? To judge by the political denunciations and demands for a ban and the many ‘what next – Hitler’s Mein Kampf as Book at Bedtime?’-type tweets, one might imagine that the BBC had cleared the primetime schedules to give the late Powell the full Nuremburg Rally treatment.
In fact, the radio programme, ‘50 Years On: Rivers of Blood’, presented by BBC media editor Amol Rajan, was tucked away in the quiet Saturday evening Archive on 4 slot, where few might have noticed if not for all the calls for it to be taken off air. Far from giving us the full Enoch, the speech was cut up into chunks read by an actor and interspersed with critical commentary that went on rather longer than Powell.
But then, the ruckus over this programme really had little to do with Enoch and the anti-immigrant politics of 1968. The pre-emptive backlash was more about Brexit, and the anti-working-class politics of 2018. The essential message of the protests was that if the demos today heard Powell’s words from 50 years ago, they might go straight out to attack Britain’s immigrant or ethnic-minority communities and turn the Thames or the Tees into real-life rivers of blood. They think we are all Enochs now.
Ironically, it is these leading Remainers who sound more like modern-day Enochs, echoing a PC version of his warnings about a coming race war caused by anti-immigrant feeling. If Powell’s rhetoric was overdone back then, theirs is ridiculous today.
For us colonials who may not have been fully immersed in late-60s British politics, the Wikipedia page helps put it into some sort of perspective.
The “Rivers of Blood” speech is a speech given by British Member of Parliament Enoch Powell on 20 April 1968, addressing a meeting of the Conservative Political Centre in Birmingham in the United Kingdom. The speech strongly criticised mass immigration, especially Commonwealth immigration to the UK and the then-proposed Race Relations Bill.
Powell always referred to it as “the Birmingham speech” and the expression “rivers of blood” did not appear in the original speech. The phrase is an allusion to a line from Virgil’s Aeneid quoted by Powell (“As I look ahead, I am filled with foreboding; like the Roman, I seem to see the River Tiber foaming with much blood”).
The speech caused a political storm, making Powell one of the most talked about, and divisive, politicians in the country, and leading to his controversial dismissal from the Shadow Cabinet by Conservative Party leader Edward Heath. According to most accounts, the popularity of Powell’s perspective on immigration may have played a decisive contributory factor in the Conservatives’ surprise victory in the 1970 general election, and he became one of the most persistent rebels opposing the subsequent Heath government.
Yes Prime Minister – Official Secrets – Expelling the Russians
Navyblue95
Published on 29 Dec 2016
April 16, 2018
Tank Chats #27 Light Tank Mark IIA | The Tank Museum
The Tank Museum
Published on 17 Oct 2016A British two-man light tank from the early thirties.
The first British light tank, the Mark I, evolved from the Carden-Loyd Carrier. The Mark II was produced in larger numbers and issued for service. Light tanks were regarded as an alternative to armoured cars with a better cross-country performance.
http://tankmuseum.org/museum-online/vehicles/object-e1952-27
