The Great War
Published 13 Sept 2024The First World War is often seen as futile and pointless. Millions of men fought and died for years, but no one was satisfied with the outcome, which did not bring a lasting peace. But that is not how governments and many people saw the war as it was being fought. So what did the countries fighting actually want to achieve? In other words, what was the purpose of the First World War?
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January 24, 2025
Was WW1 Pointless? – War Goals Of Every Major Nation
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January 23, 2025
The Google of the early modern era
Ted Gioia compares the modern market power of the Google behemoth to the only commercial enterprise in human history to control half of the world’s trade — Britain’s “John Company”, or formally, the East India Company which lasted over 250 years growing from an also-ran to Dutch and Portuguese EICs to the biggest ever to sail the seas:
No business ever matched the power of the East India Company. It dominated global trade routes, and used that power to control entire nations. Yet it eventually collapsed — ruined by the consequences of its own extreme ambitions.
Anybody who wants to understand how big businesses destroy themselves through greed and overreaching needs to know this case study. And that’s especially true right now — because huge web platforms are trying to do the exact same thing in the digital economy that the East India Company did in the real world.
Google is the closest thing I’ve ever seen to the East India Company. And it will encounter the exact same problems, and perhaps meet the same fate.
The concept is simple. If you control how people connect to the economy, you have enormous power over them.
You don’t even need to run factories or set up retail stores. You don’t need to manufacture anything, or create any object with intrinsic value.
You just control the links between buyers and sellers — and then you squeeze them as hard as you can.
That’s why the East India Company focused on trade routes. They were the hyperlinks of that era.
So it needed ships the way Google needs servers.
The launch of the massive East India merchant ship, the Edinburgh — which brought tea from China.
The seeds for this rapacious business were planted when the British captured a huge Portuguese ship in 1592. The boat, called the Madre de Deus, was three times larger than anything the Brits had ever built.
But it was NOT a military vessel. The Portuguese ship was filled with cargo.
The sailors couldn’t believe what they had captured. They found chests of gold and silver coins, diamond-set jewelry, pearls as big as your thumb, all sorts of silks and tapestries, and 15 tons of ebony.
The spices alone weighed a staggering 50 tons — cinnamon, nutmeg, cloves, pepper, and other magical substances rarely seen in British kitchens.
This one cargo ship represented as much wealth as half of the entire English treasury.
And it raised an obvious question. Why should the English worry about military ships — or anything else, really — when you could make so much money trading all this stuff?
Not long after, a group of merchants and explorers started hatching plans to launch a trading company — and finally received a charter from Queen Elizabeth in 1600.
The East India Company was now a reality, but it needed to play catchup. The Dutch and the Portuguese were already established in the merchant shipping business.
By 1603, the East India Company had three ships. A decade later that had grown to eight. But the bigger it got, the more ambitious it became.
The rates of return were enormous — an average of 138% on the first dozen voyages. So the management was obsessed with expanding as rapidly as possible.
They call it scalability nowadays.
But even if they dominated and oppressed like bullies, these corporate bosses still craved a veneer of respectability and legitimacy — just like Google’s CEO at the innauguration yesterday. So the company got a Coat of Arms, playacting as if it were a royal family or noble clan.
As a royally chartered company, I believe the EIC was automatically entitled to create and use a coat of arms. Here’s the original from the reign of Queen Elizabeth I:
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January 22, 2025
The Korean War 031 – Operation Wolfhound – January 21, 1951
The Korean War by Indy Neidell
Published 21 Jan 2025Matt Ridgway sends forth the US 27th Infantry Regiment, known as the Wolfhounds, into the no-mans-land between the UN and Chinese lines to sniff out and hunt down their enemy. The success or failure of his first few operations in Korea could be crucial, as confidence in the UN mission from generals, politicians, and the US’ allies continues to teeter on a knife edge. A strong showing here could finally put the uncertainty to rest.
Chapters
00:00 Intro
00:45 Recap
01:11 Meeting at Taegu
04:19 Operation Wolfhound
07:44 Collins Reports
09:35 Trouble in Paradise
12:59 Wonju
14:54 Summary
15:18 Conclusion
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QotD: The Who
The Who’s case for being the greatest rock band in history, and it has one, depends on the band having been a four-piece act in which all four pieces had the absolute maximum of performing ability and musical personality. To find any equivalent — maybe Zeppelin comes close — you would probably have to quit rock and go rummaging through the jazz section.
But I’ll tell you right now, there ain’t no Moon over there. I mean, good Lord: OF COURSE Keith Moon and John Entwistle were a difficult rhythm section for a guitarist to play in front of. Have you listened to those records? Professionals have talked about how watching Moon play up close was an exercise in constant suspense — you would see him take off at the start of the bar and go roaming around the drum kit and wonder how he could possibly make it back in time. He usually did make it — when he wasn’t so zonked he was falling off his stool, which is also a thing that happened sometimes.
This intricate, frantic quality is what made Moon the most inimitable of the great rock drummers — someone whose style you could recognize in a matter of seconds if he were playing on biscuit tins — but the difficulty of playing in front of a notional “timekeeper” so adventurous, and particularly doing it in concert, ought to be self-evident.
The standard advice for a rock guitarist in this predicament would be to make sure he had a very steady, unadventurous bass player to anchor the group. And the bassists for many excellent groups do, in fact, secretly stick to four or five notes they’re real comfortable with. But Entwistle offered Moon-like challenges as part of a rhythm section, albeit without inducing the same terror. At any moment his left hand might start leaping like a salmon on the fretboard, and if he played half notes in one bar, this was no guarantee he wouldn’t be doing startling, blinding sixteenths in the next.
That’s what makes Who records Who records; that’s what lifts the best ones above even the empyrean level of Townshend’s songwriting. But it meant, as Pete explained in his apology, that he could never step out and “shred” as a guitarist. The entire structure of the traditional rock group was topsy-turvy with the Who, and Townshend, whose ego is at least as big as the next fellow’s (spoiler: it’s bigger), was forced in some regard to be the responsible one, the custodian of the rhythm.
Colby Cosh, “Leave Pete Townshend alone!”, National Post, 2019-11-29.
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January 16, 2025
The allegations against author Neil Gaiman
I haven’t read the article in question, but it certainly looks ugly if even a few of the allegations turn out to be true:
New York magazine has just published a very long investigative piece on alleged sexual misconduct by the author Neil Gaiman, both contextualizing previously-known allegations and introducing new ones. Writer Lila Shapiro, who clearly did an awful lot of legwork, found several new women who allege various forms of bad sexual behavior against Gaiman. It’s all very serious and disturbing, obviously. I have nothing to contribute and no one cares what I think about such things, so we can leave that story there.
But I’m afraid that Shapiro’s piece does again force me to think about New York‘s story last year about Andrew Huberman. You could be forgiven for thinking “New York‘s SIMILAR story last year about Andrew Huberman,” but this would not be a correct characterization; where Gaiman is accused of many acts that, if true, rise to the level of sexual misconduct, including rape, the Huberman piece contains no such allegations. Huberman is accused of dating multiple women at the same time without the knowledge of all involved, of infidelity generally, and there’s a bizarre fixation on his regular tardiness. It is not a MeTooing piece. And the trouble, I’m afraid, is that the piece was written, edited, packaged, and promoted in a way that inevitably gave audiences the impression that such allegations were included — that Andrew Huberman had been MeToo’d.
The fact that the piece contains no allegations of that type, but seems to have been very deliberately associated by New York, its author Kerry Howley, the magazine’s social media channels, and their many media kaffeeklatsch allies with MeToo stories, was a terrible error in editorial judgment. The Gaiman story helps underline why: this shit is so serious that we can’t afford to play around with these types of narratives. The Rolling Stone University of Virginia gang rape fraternity initiation story, a narrative that fell apart under the barest scrutiny and should never have survived even an amateur journalistic investigation, did a lot of damage in our ongoing efforts to take sexual assault on campus seriously. There’s a higher bar to clear with this stuff for that reason, and the Huberman story utterly failed to clear it.
The story’s presentation in the magazine was draped with innuendo, with as many leading terms and dark implications as can be stuffed in. The image on the cover is styled and colored to make him look sinister. People associated with New York tweeted about the piece as if it was a nuclear bomb, using the kind of language that we’ve grown accustomed to when a MeToo story is published and kills a career. I would argue that the story is deliberately written in the slow-burn reveal style that is typically deployed in MeToo stories — that’s deployed, in fact, in the Gaiman story. (There it makes sense, because the slow burn leads to actual accusations.) At every opportunity, the story exaggerates the implication of a man who, yes, was a shithead to some women he dated. The article is forever presenting quotidian-if-unfortunate behaviors and acting as though we should interpret those behaviors as worthy of the kind of censure that has been brought to bear by men guilty of sexual misconduct in the MeToo era. “I experienced his rage,” says one of Huberman’s exes, suggesting some sort of domestic violence situation, when in fact that’s a reference to a verbal argument — again, maybe unfortunate, but simply not in the world of misconduct.
The magazine’s internal references to the piece, and their social media, played up the usual teasing manner of such publicity, broadly hinting at bad behavior in the realm of sex and romance. The repeated phrase used was “manipulative behavior, deceit, and numerous affairs”. I don’t need to tell you that many people, trained by six-plus years of reading about sexual misconduct, are going to assume that a vast cover story in one of the country’s biggest magazines about a man’s bad behavior and deceit towards his partners is going to be a MeToo story. As many would go on to say, the fanfare and length and publicity about the piece themselves implied that it was a MeTooing. After all, what else would justify that level of attention?
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January 15, 2025
Desert Storm: The Gulf War 1990-1991
Real Time History
Published 6 Sept 2024When Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in the summer of 1990, he didn’t anticipate a massive international backslash and unanimous Security Council response. Soon a broad military Coalition under leadership of the United States assembled and kicked the Iraqi Army out of Kuwait. In the aftermath several Iraqi groups rose up against Saddam but the Coalition didn’t support a regime change.
CHAPTERS:
00:00 Intro
00:29 Saddam Hussein Victorious (but Broke)
03:49 Iraqi Invasion of Kuwait
06:02 The Coalition Against Iraq Forms
08:37 Operation Desert Shield
10:55 Operation Desert Storm
20:26 Iraqi Highway of Death
21:39 Iraqi Uprisings
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January 14, 2025
Andrew Sullivan on the “grooming gangs” scandal in Britain
These rape gangs have been operating for more than a decade in English towns and cities yet the government does everything it possibly can to avoid taking action, for fear of being accused of racism (or perhaps fear of what they’d discover if they did properly investigate) and losing all those Muslim votes:
The first response of most human beings to news of irredeemably evil acts is to ask who committed them. And if the answer makes us deeply uncomfortable, we tend to move on pronto. You see this most obviously on social media with news of an atrocity. Was the shooter white, a Democrat, a Republican, Muslim, MAGA, woke, trans? And where did the victim fit into these categories?
Our priors instantly color our moral judgment, and even our sense of the seriousness of the offense. And the temptation simply to deny what seems to be in front of our nose can be overwhelming.
[…]
The more intense the horror, the more powerful the instinct to doubt when you first hear of it. The sex-abuse scandal in my own church first numbed and incapacitated me. It took some time for me to see the totality of what had happened, and how deeply it had destroyed Catholic moral authority. Again, when I first read about, say, the Catholic school for deaf children where a priest had picked his victims among those whose parents did not know sign language, the feeling of horror was almost too much to process at all. And as with the Bush administration’s torture policy, it took even more time to grasp how this moral rot had been enabled by the very top.
This is why, I think, the scandal of Britain’s Pakistani rape-gangs, and the institutional negligence toward tens of thousands of underage victims over several years, has had a second burst of life. A serious national inquiry on the scandal was conducted years ago (its recommendations not yet implemented). But several towns with the worst records were omitted from that inquiry; and the sheer scale and depravity of what happened has finally begun to sink in. The precipitant was Elon Musk pontificating about the scandal on X, as part of his campaign to bring down Keir Starmer.
The details are hard to absorb. Think of the hideous abuse suffered by that extraordinary French woman, Gisèle Pelicot, sedated and raped by dozens of French men, organized by her husband. Now think of that kind of organized gang-bang — but make it close to ubiquitous in some towns and the victims under-age girls: raped, brutalized, mutilated, beaten, their lives destroyed. Yes, it was that bad. Tens of thousands of rape victims across the country. This is how one British judge addressed some culprits at sentencing:
You coerced her into providing sex to vast numbers of strangers. Up to four or five men would be invited to addresses so they could have sex with her … Threats were made to kill her … If she resisted, she would be coerced. Customers would become angry … If oral sex was required, her head would be pushed down, her hair pulled and she would be slapped. Strangers would burn her with cigarettes. A stranger almost throttled her. One deliberately scratched her vagina with his nails. One inserted a hairbrush into her vagina.
The victim was just 13 years old. And she wasn’t unconscious. In just one town, a “conservative estimate is that approximately 1,400 children were sexually exploited” between 1997 and 2013. And in communities dominated by men of Pakistani origin, largely from the Mirpuri region of Kashmir, who held huge sway over the police and local community — just like the Catholic Church in Boston — cover-ups were routine.
Among the abuse concealed: gang-rapes of a single minor by 20 men; putting a pump into a girl’s anus so more men could penetrate her at once; and constant threats of murder of the girls or their families if anyone spoke up. In one case, a minor was arrested and charged with prostitution for having oral sex in a car with a john. When she attended her trial, she discovered that the magistrate in charge of her case was the man she’d fellated. No one knows the full number of minor girls affected, but it is in at least the tens of thousands, and possibly in the six figures.
Why was this allowed to go on for so long? For the same reason the Catholic Church covered up child rape for decades, and Dick Cheney covered up torture. Because the orthodoxies of Catholicism, of the American military, and, in this case, the multicultural experiment were respectively involved. These orthodoxies were sacred, their cultural power extreme. Catholic Boston, conservative America, and elite liberal Britain therefore defended their own orthodoxies for a very long time. And with every successful deflection of responsibility, the number of victims increased.
The truth damns the multicultural project in Britain. Rather than integrating these men of Pakistani heritage, insisting that they adopt the laws and mores of the native population, and treating them like everyone else, the UK elites celebrated cultural difference, enabled the siloing of these populations, bemoaned their own white working-class populations, and forbade any criticism of Islam. So if you called out this stuff, you were instantly called racist. After all, to accuse a non-white minority of raping white girls was a trope right out of white-supremacist fever dreams. And yes, it is a hideous racist trope — from the depths of the American South. But sometimes the trope is the truth.
In all the major cases, I’ve found no reported evidence of Pakistani or Muslim girls being groomed and raped — only poor, white natives. The justification among the rapists, moreover, was that these non-Muslims were sluts who were asking for it and beneath contempt. Racist insults were common as these girls were brutally abused. These were not just rapes, but hate crimes of a grisly sort.
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January 13, 2025
Forgotten War – Ep 7 – Imphal ’44 Pt1 – Planning Prevents
HardThrasher
Published 12 Jan 2025DO NOT PANIC IF YOU HAVEN’T WATCHED THE OTHER VIDEOS IN THIS SERIES YOU CAN START HERE
A video discussing the planning phase of the Battles of Imphal and Kohima at the start of 1944
Please consider donations of any size to the Burma Star Memorial Fund who aim to ensure remembrance of those who fought with, in and against 14th Army 1941–1945 — https://burmastarmemorial.org/
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QotD: The rise of coal in England
And not far along the coast from the city were also the huge woodlands of the Weald, which stretched across the southeastern counties of Sussex, Surrey and Kent, and which did not even send much of their wood to London at all. Firewood from the Weald was not only exported to the Low Countries and the northern coast of France, but those exports more than tripled between 1490 and the early 1530s, from some 1.5 million billets per year to over 4.7 million. That level was still being reached in 1550, when not interrupted by on-and-off war with France, but by then the Weald was also meeting yet another new demand, for making iron.3
Ironmaking was extremely wood-hungry. In the 1550s Weald, making just a single ton of “pig” or cast iron, fit only for cannon or cooking pots, required almost 4 tons of charcoal, which in turn required roughly another 28 tons or so of seasoned wood. England in the early sixteenth century had imported the vast majority of its iron from Spain, but between 1530 and 1550 Wealden pig iron production increased eightfold. The expansion would have demanded, on a very conservative estimate, the sustained annual output of at least 50,000 acres of woodland — an area over sixty times the size of New York’s Central Park. Yet even this hugely understates the true scale of the expansion, as pig iron needed to be refined into bar or wrought iron in order to be fit for most uses, which required twice as much charcoal again — or in other words, a total of 86 tons of seasoned wood had to be first baked and then burned, just to make one ton of bar iron from the ore. And all this was just the beginning. By the 1590s the output of the Wealden ironworks had more than tripled again, for pig iron alone (though the efficiency of charcoal usage had also halved — a story for another time, perhaps).4
Given the rapidity of these changes, it will come as no surprise that there were complaints from the locals about how much the ironworks had increased the price of fuel for their homes. No doubt the wood being exported was having a similar effect as well. But the 1540s and 50s were also time of rapid general inflation, because of a dramatic debasement of the currency initiated by Henry VIII to pay for his wars. This not only made imports significantly more expensive, and so likely spurred much of the activity in the Weald to replace increasingly unaffordable iron from Spain, but they also made exports significantly cheaper for buyers abroad — and thus unaffordable for the English themselves.
In 1548-9, in a desperate bid to keep prices down, royal proclamations repeatedly and futilely banned the export of English wheat, malt, oats, barley, butter, cheese, bacon, beef, tallow, hides, and leather, to which the following year were added — like a game of inflation whack-a-mole — rye, peas, beans, bread, biscuits, mutton, veal, lamb, pork, ale, beer, wool, and candles. And of course charcoal and wood.5 For us to have records of the Weald exporting large quantities of wood in 1550 then, they must either have been sold through special royal licence, or have all been shipped out before the ban came in force just halfway through the year in May. Presumably a great deal more than recorded was also smuggled out. In 1555, parliament saw the need to put the ban on exporting victuals and wood into law, adding severe penalties. Transgressing merchants would lose their ship and have to pay a fine worth double the value of the contraband goods, while the ship’s mariners would see all their worldly possessions seized, and be imprisoned for at least a year without bail.6
It’s perhaps no wonder that the Weald’s ironworks continued to expand at such a rapid pace: the export ban would have freed up a great deal of woodland for their use. And ironmaking soon spread to other parts of England too, to where it did not have to compete for fuel with people’s homes. Given iron was significantly more valuable by both weight and volume than wood, it could easily bear the cost of transporting it from further away, and so could be made much further inland, away from the coasts and rivers whose woodlands served cities. In the early seventeenth century, iron ore and pig iron from the southwest of England was sometimes shipped all the way to well-wooded Ireland for smelting or refining into bar.7 In the early eighteenth century scrap iron from as far away as even the Netherlands was being recycled in the forested valleys of southwestern Scotland.8
Whenever ironmaking hit the limits of what could be sustainably grown in an area, it simply expanded into the next place where wood was cheap. And there was almost always another place. England, having had to import some three quarters of its iron from Spain in the 1530s, by the 1580s was almost entirely self-sufficient, after which the total amount of iron it produced using charcoal continued to grow, reaching its peak another two hundred years later in the 1750s.9 Had iron-making not been able to find sustainable supplies of fuel within England, it would have disappeared within just a few years rather than experiencing almost two centuries of expansion.10
And that’s just iron. The late sixteenth century also saw the rapid rise in England of a charcoal-hungry glass-making industry too. Green glass for small bottles had long been made in some of England’s forests in small quantities, but large quantities of glass for windows had had to be imported from the Low Countries and France. Just as with iron, however, the effect of debasement was to make the imports unaffordable for the English, and so French workers were enticed over in the 1550s and 60s to make window glass in the Weald. Soon afterwards, Venetian-style crystal-clear drinking glasses were being made there too.
What makes glass even more interesting than iron, however, is that its breakability meant it could not be made too far away from the cities in which it would be sold, and so had to compete directly with people’s homes for its fuel. Yet by the 1570s crystal glass was even being made even within London itself. Despite charcoal supplies being by far the largest cost of production, over the course of the late sixteenth century the price of glass in England remained stable, making it increasingly common and affordable while the price of pretty much everything else rose.11
What we have then is not evidence of a mid-sixteenth-century shortage of wood for fuel, and certainly not of those demands causing deforestation. It is instead evidence of truly unprecedented demands being generally and sustainably met.
And despite these unprecedented demands, the intensity with which under-woods were exploited for fuel seems to have actually decreased. During the medieval population peaks, the woods and hedges that supplied London had been squeezed for more fuel by simply cropping the trunks and branches more often, cutting them away every six or seven years rather than waiting for them to grow into larger poles or logs. After the Black Death killed off half the population, the cropping cycle could again lengthen to about eleven. But under-woods in the mid-sixteenth century were being cropped on average only twelve or so years — about twice as long a cycle as before the Black Death — which by the nineteenth century had lengthened still further to fourteen or fifteen.12
The lengthening of the cropping cycle can imply a number of things, and we’ll get to them all. But one possibility is that in order to meet unprecedented demands, more firewood was being collected at the expense of the other major use of trees: for timber.
Anton Howes, “The Coal Conquest”, Age of Invention, 2024-10-04.
1. Estienne Perlin, “A description of England and Scotland” [1558], in The Antiquarian Repertory, vol.1 (1775), p.231. Perlin must have visited Britain in early 1553, as he mentions the arrival of a new French ambassador, which occurred in April 1553, as well as the wedding of Lady Jane Grey, which occurred in May of that year. Also Danielo Barbaro, “Report (May 1551)” in Calendar of State Papers Relating to English Affairs in the Archives of Venice, Vol 5: 1534-1554 (Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1873). And: Paul Warde and Tom Williamson, “Fuel Supply and Agriculture in Post-Medieval England”, The Agricultural History Review 62, no. 1 (2014), p.71
2. Galloway et al., p.457 for the estimate of 17.4 miles overland as the outer limit of London’s firewood supply; Proceedings in the Parliaments of Elizabeth I, Vol I: 1558-1581, ed. T.E. Hartley (Leicester University Press, 1981), p.370: specifically, the London MP Rowland Hayward complained of the cost of firewood billets and charcoal having increased in price over the previous 30 years (which would encompass the period of debasement-induced inflation), before noting that “Sometimes the want of wood has driven the City to make provision in such places as they have been driven to carry it 12 miles by land”.
3. Mavis E. Mate, Trade and Economic Developments, 1450-1550: The Experience of Kent, Surrey and Sussex (Boydell Press, 2006), pp.83, 92, 101.
4. These statistics are derived from a combination of Peter King, “The Production and Consumption of Bar Iron in Early Modern England and Wales”, The Economic History Review 58, no. 1 (1 February 2005), pp.1–33 for the iron production estimates, and G. Hammersley, “The Charcoal Iron Industry and Its Fuel, 1540-1750”, The Economic History Review 26, no. 4 (1973), pp.593–613 for the estimates of how much charcoal, wood, and land was required at a given date to produce a given quantity of pig or bar iron.
5. Paul L. Hughes and James F. Larkin, eds., Tudor Royal Proclamations., Vol. I: The Early Tudors (1485-1553) (Yale University Press, 1964), proclamations nos. 304, 310, 318, 319, 345, 357, 361, 365, 366.
6. 1 & 2 Philip & Mary, c.5 (1555)
7. William Brereton, Travels in Holland, the United Provinces, England, Scotland and Ireland 1634-1635, ed. Edward Hawkins (The Chetham Society, 1844), p.147
8. T. C. Smout, ed., “Journal of Henry Kalmeter’s Travels in Scotland, 1719-20”, in Scottish Industrial History: A Miscellany, vol. 14, 4 (Scottish History Society, 1978), p.19
9. See King. Note that there was an interruption to this growth in the mid-seventeenth century, for reasons I mention later on.
10. There was a period in the early-to-mid seventeenth century when English ironmaking stagnated, but this was due to the growth of a competitive ironmaking industry in Sweden.
11. D. W. Crossley, “The Performance of the Glass Industry in Sixteenth-Century England”, The Economic History Review 25, no. 3 (1972), pp.421–33
12. Galloway et al. On cropping cycles in particular, see pp.454-5: they note how the average cropping of wood in their sample c.1300 was about every seven years, but by 1375-1400 — once population pressures had receded due to the Black Death — the average had increased to every eleven. See also Rackham, pp.140-1. John Worlidge, Systema agriculturæ (1675), p.96 mentions that coppice “of twelve or fifteen years are esteemed fit for the axe. But those of twenty years’ standing are better, and far advance the price. Seventeen years’ growth affords a tolerable fell”.
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January 12, 2025
Quebec within the British Empire after 1760
Fortissax, in response to a question about the historical situation of Quebec within Canada, outlines the history from before the Seven Years’ War (aka the “French and Indian War” to Americans) through the American Revolution, the 1837-38 rebellions, the Durham Report, and Confederation:
First and foremost, Canada itself, as a state — an administrative body, if you will — was originally founded by France. Jacques Cartier named the region in 1535, and Samuel de Champlain established the first permanent French settlement in North America in Quebec City in 1608. This settlement would become the largest and most populous administrative hub for the entire territory. Canada was a colony within the broader territory of New France, which stretched from as far north as Tadoussac all the way down to Louisiana. It included multiple hereditary land-owning noblemen of Norman extraction.
Much of the original territory of New France
During the Seven Years’ War, on 8 September 1760, General Lévis and Pierre de Vaudreuil surrendered the colony of Canada to the British after the capitulation of Montreal. Though the British had effectively won the war, the Conquest’s details still had to be negotiated between Great Britain and France. In the interim, the region was placed under a military regime. As per the Old World’s “rules of war”, Britain assured the 60,000 to 70,000 French inhabitants freedom from deportation and confiscation of property, freedom of religion, the right to migrate to France, and equal treatment in the fur trade. These assurances were formalized in the 55 Articles of the Capitulation of Montreal, which granted most of the French demands, including the rights to practice Roman Catholicism, protections for Seigneurs and clergymen, and amnesty for soldiers. Indigenous allies of the French were also assured that their rights and privileges would be respected.
The Treaty of Paris in 1763 officially ended the war and renamed the French colony of “Canada” as “the Province of Quebec”. Initially, its borders included parts of present-day Ontario and Michigan. To address growing tensions between Britain and the Thirteen Colonies and to maintain peace in Quebec, the British Parliament passed the Quebec Act in 1774. This act solidified the French-speaking Catholic population’s rights, such as the free practice of Catholicism, restoration of French civil law, and exemption from oaths referencing Protestant Christianity. These provisions satisfied the Québécois Seigneurs (land-owning nobleman), and clergy by preserving their traditional rights and influence. However, some Anglo settlers in America resented the Act, viewing it as favoring the French Catholic majority. Despite this, the Act helped maintain stability in Quebec, ensuring it remained loyal to Britain during the American Revolutionary War and Quebec was fiercely opposed to liberal French revolutionaries.
British concessions, from the terms of the 1763 Treaty of Paris to the Quebec Act of 1774, safeguarded the cultural and religious identity of Quebec’s French-speaking Catholic population, fostering their loyalty during a period of significant upheaval in North America. Following this period, merchant families such as the Molsons began establishing themselves in Montreal, alongside early Loyalist settlers who trickled into areas now known as the Eastern Townships. These merchant families quickly ingratiated themselves with the local Norman lords and seigneurs.
The Lower Canada Rebellion arose in 1837-1838 due to the Château Clique oligarchy (an alliance of Anglo-Scottish industrialists and French noble landowners), in Quebec refusing to grant legislative power to the French Canadian majority. The rebellion was not solely a French Canadian effort; to the chagrin of both chauvinistic Anglo-Canadians and French Canadians, who in recent years believed it was either a brutal crackdown on French degeneracy, or a heroic class struggle of French peasants against an oppressive Anglo elite. It included figures like Wolfred Nelson, an Anglo-Quebecer who personally led troops into battle.
In response to the unrest following the rebellions of 1837-1838, Lord Durham, a British noble, was sent to Canada to investigate and propose solutions. His controversial recommendation, outlined in the Durham Report of 1839, was to abolish the separate legislatures of Upper Canada (Ontario) and Lower Canada (Quebec) and merge them into a single entity: the Province of Canada. This unification aimed to demographically and culturally assimilate the French Canadian population by creating an English-speaking majority.
However, the strategy failed for multiple reasons, and was given up shortly after. Lord Durham, having neither been born nor raised in the New World, underestimated the complexities of Canadian society, which was a unique fusion of Old World ideas in a New World setting. His assumption that French Canadians could be assimilated ignored their strong cultural identity, rooted in large families, which encouraged high birth rates as a means of survival. While Durham hoped unification would erode divisions, the old grievances between the British and French began to dissipate naturally.
The Province of Canada, whose unofficial capital was Montreal, where the two groups mixed
Despite Lord Durham’s intentions, French Canadians maintained their dominance in Quebec. Families averaged five children per household for over 230 years, a trend actively encouraged by the Catholic Church’s policy of La Revanche des Berceaux (the Revenge of the Cradles). This strategy aimed to preserve French Canadian culture and identity amidst the British short-lived attempts at assimilation. In Montreal, British industrialists expanded their influence by forging alliances with French landowning nobles through business partnerships and intermarriage. This blending of elites produced a bilingual Anglo-French upper class that became historically influential.
Such alliances drew on long-standing connections established as early as 1763 and later exemplified by the North West Company (NWC). The NWC in particular is interesting as a prominent fur trading enterprise of the late 18th and early 19th centuries, in that it embodied this fusion of cultures. Led primarily by Anglo-Scots, the company’s leaders frequently formed unions or marriages with French Canadian women, fostering vital ties with the French Canadian communities crucial to their trade. Simon McTavish, known as the “father” of the NWC, maintained alliances with French Canadian families, while his nephew, William McGillivray, and other leaders like Duncan McGillivray followed similar paths. Explorers such as Alexander MacKenzie and David Thompson married French women. These unions strengthened familial and cultural bonds, shaping the broader Anglo-French collaboration that defined this period.
This relative harmony between Anglo and French Canadians continued with the formation of the modern Canadian state in 1867 during Confederation. Sir John A. Macdonald deliberately chose George-Étienne Cartier as his second-in-command. This collaboration contributed to the emergence of Canada’s ethnically Anglo-French elite, who have historically been bilingual. This legacy is evident in the backgrounds of many Canadian politicians, such as the Trudeaus, Mulroneys, Martins, Cartiers, and countless others who have both Anglo-Canadian and French-Canadian roots.
In more recent history, this dynamic has been further solidified by the federal government, where higher-paid positions often require bilingual proficiency. Interestingly, about 20% of Canada’s population is bilingual, reflecting the ongoing influence of this historical coexistence.
The last cannon which is shot on this continent in defence of Great Britain will be fired by the hand of a French Canadian.
~ George Etienne Cartier
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January 11, 2025
Euphemizing organized gang rapes of children as “grooming” won’t work much longer
It’s possible that the current upswell of anger about the decade-long cover-up of organized child rape gangs in English towns and cities may come to nothing … or it could result in a complete breakdown of law and order:
Like professional basketball, those accused of being members of “grooming gangs” tend to be monocultural.
The grooming gang thing has really blown up in the past couple of weeks. I’m not sure wholly why myself but a couple of guesses.
One is that the media really couldn’t report all that much — and for the same reason that Tommy Robinson got jailed one time around. Because there have been multiple ongoing cases and full reporting of one could — and probably would too — prejudice a jury in subsequent cases. So, those ongoing cases mean that the subject is more or less sub judice and can’t, in volume or detail, be talked about.
Thus things like Guardian reporting. Where you get the news that a gang has been tried, found guilty, sent off to jail. And no comment on who they were. Well, except for a list of names all of which are, shall we say, less than Anglo Saxon or even Viking in origin. We all draw our own conclusions at that point.
[…]
The number of abused — which means children raped, recall, arses blown up with pumps so that adult dicks can multiply penetrate to be detailed — starts to be counted up into the thousands. The tens of thousands perhaps.
There’s a point there at which I don’t think that normal societal agreement to allow the authorities to handle things works any more. At some point along that spectrum then significant civil violence breaks out.
Which brings me to the two questions. What is that number which, when known, leads to actual riots? And no, I don’t mean 15 meatheads lobbing half bricks at the police. Actual real and sustained loss of civilian authority control. The second, obviously, is are we going to reach that number?
In short, what is the level of betrayal of these girls that leaves the mob triumphant over law and order?
What really worries me is that I have a horrible — even if still slight at this point — suspicion that there was enough vileness done to enough young girls that we’re going to find out.
On Substack, Francis Turner shares concerns about the mass rapes of children and young women over too many years:
The scandal has been going on for at least 25 years and probably a decade more. That means that every year around 1000 new girls have been gang raped by the gangs.
Every year around 1000 new girls have been gang raped by the gangs
There are roughly 300,000 girls of each year cohort in the UK so that means one in around 300 girls of any age group has been gang-raped. Given that there are large chunks of the UK which are not places where the ~50 identified rape gangs have operated and indeed are places without residents of the relevant ethnicity (primarily Pakistani and Somali in a couple of cases) that means that the number goes way up in those areas. It seems likely that in one those 50 areas the ratio of new victims to their year group is more like 1 in 100 or 1%, especially when you remove the Pakistani girls that probably weren’t targeted even if some of them were in fact abused at home.
In places like Telford if you see a school year group photo for any year in a Comprehensive school in the last 30+ years at least one of the girls in that photo was being gang-raped
If successful steps had been taken in ~2010 to stop the abuse then about 15,000 girls would not have been gang-raped.
The Tory party and civil service disgust of Tommy Robinson has had the result that about 5000 girls were gang raped between when Tommy Robinson started going about the issue in around 2018 and 2023 when Sunak finally set up the national Grooming Gangs Taskforce.
If Substack would let me do a table this would be easier. However here is a summary of girls gang-raped under the prime ministers of this century based on a simple linear model
Starmer: 500 (to date)
Sunak: 1700
Truss: <100
Johnson: 3000+
May: 3000
Cameron: 6000+
Brown: 3000-
Blair: 10,000Probably half of Blair’s 10,000 was before anyone was aware that this was a systemic problem, but it was known to be a potential problem by at least 2004 when
[a] Channel 4 documentary about claims young white girls in Bradford were being groomed for sex by Asian abusers is delayed as police forces warn it could inflame racial tensions. It was finally shown three months later.
If the UK had got serious about stopping grooming gangs back in 2004 then over half of the gang rape victims could have been saved from such a terrible experience.
Take that 35,000 number a different way. There are roughly 35 million women in the UK. So one in a 1000 women in the UK have been gang-raped over the decades.
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January 9, 2025
“Starmer is a banshee of a prime minister; he makes a terrible noise but is completely lacking in substance”
The extent of active disinterest to ongoing criminal activity in British towns and cities over a period of several years passes belief. The fear of being accused of racism metastasized to the extent that the authorities may even have colluded with criminals to hide the crimes to preserve politicians’ and senior bureaucrats’ careers. It’s now broken through the conspiracy of silence to being actively discussed in British media and even on the floor of the House of Commons. Even the Prime Minister may have to answer for past actions (or inactions):
It’s very easy to judge the past, particularly when you’re on the “right side of history”. What supreme confidence it must take to assume that all previous generations had got it so wrong, and that humanity was simply waiting for you to turn up and set them straight.
And yet isn’t it curious that so many who like to judge the values and behaviour of people in the past are also rarely willing to turn that critical eye on other cultures that exist today? According to the principle of cultural relativism, all societies and ways of life are equal. So we must not assert that we are morally better to a culture that permits the genital mutilation of children or that denies women an education, but we may assume that we are highly superior to the Ancient Greeks.
This debate has become particularly relevant with the recent explosion of interest in the rape gangs scandal. A report by Professor Alexis Jay in 2022 determined that more than 1,400 young girls were raped and abused in the period between 1997 and 2013 by what became known as the “grooming gangs”, so called because of the manipulative tactics that were employed to gain the victims’ trust. These groups comprised mostly of men of Pakistani heritage, which led many authorities to overlook the severity of the crimes.
Consider this example from a speech delivered by Andrew Norfolk, reporter for the Times. When police discovered a 13-year-old girl, drunk and mostly naked in the company of seven Pakistani men, they arrested her and failed to question any of the adults.
Police have admitted that such failures to investigate were largely down to a desire to avoid allegations of racism. The Jay report noted that several members of local council staff “described their nervousness about identifying the ethnic origins of perpetrators for fear of being thought as racist; others remembered clear direction from their managers not to do so”. Politicians and media commentators were more concerned with maintaining the fantasy that multiculturalism has been a success, rather than taking seriously their obligation to safeguard children. When Julie Bindel — the first journalist to investigate the grooming gangs — tried to publish her findings, she faced resistance ‘because some editors feared an accusation of racism’.
The Labour government has shown itself incapable of making amends. Jess Phillips has rejected a request for a public inquiry into child sexual exploitation in Oldham. And Keir Starmer has stated that anyone interested in a full-scale inquiry into these failings is jumping “on a bandwagon of the far right”.
This acute form of tone-deafness would, in any sound political climate, be cause for immediate resignation. While it is true that racists will be quick to weaponise the criminal behaviour of a minority, there is nothing remotely “far right” in taking an interest in the wellbeing of children and wishing to see those who abuse them held to account. But Starmer is a banshee of a prime minister; he makes a terrible noise but is completely lacking in substance.
Something may change with the release this week of crime league tables according to nationality. Up until now, there has been tremendous political resistance to releasing such statistics, with police in many European countries not recording such details at all in order to preserve the daydream of multiculturalism. And yet those that do keep such records have revealed a clear trend. Data from the Danish government, for instance, has shown that although non-Western immigrants constitute only 9% of the population, they account for 25% of convictions for violent crime. According to the Telegraph, in Sweden immigrants are “three times more likely to be registered as a suspect for assault than the native population – which grows to four times for robbery, and five times for rape”.
By happenstance, I posted this to social media the other day, which seems apposite:
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January 8, 2025
The Korean War 029 – The Third Battle of Seoul – January 7, 1951
The Korean War by Indy Neidell
Published 7 Jan 2025The Chinese People’s Volunteer Army crosses the Imjin River in force and attacks the South Korean capital. The best units available to Eighth Army commander Matt Ridgway defend it, but with more Chinese armies and reformed North Korean units pushing in the east, is there any hope of holding onto it?
Chapters
00:00 Intro
00:50 Recap
01:09 Seoul Good
03:13 Seoul Gone
07:39 To Line D
10:20 The Ceasefire Committee
14:02 Summary
14:20 Conclusion
(more…)
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How To Make 17th Century Clotted Cream – A History
Tasting History with Max Miller
Published 27 Aug 2024Clotted cream served with scones and jam
City/Region: England | Scotland
Time Period: 1670 | 1755Clotted cream is one of the most delicious and simple foods I’ve ever had. It’s made with only one ingredient, but has a richness and nuttiness that is divine. It’s one of those foods that is difficult to track down the origins of, but one story includes the ancient Phoenicians, and another a fairy princess and prince. Both are equally likely to be true.
For best results, look for cream that isn’t ultra-pasteurized. Labels will say “pasteurized” or “low temp pasteurized”. This recipe doesn’t have a lot of active time, but the cream does need to cook for 12 hours, so I recommend starting first thing in the morning. It’s worth it.
To make clouted Cream
Take Milk that was milked in the morning, and scald it at noon; it must have a reasonable fire under it, but not too rash, and when it is scalding hot, that you see little Pimples begin to rise, take away the greatest part of the Fire, then let it stand and harden a little while, then take it off, and let it stand until the next day, covered, then take it off with a Skimmer.
— The Queen-Like Closet, or Rich Cabinet by Hannah Wolley, 1670Clouted Cream
… If you please beat Part of it with a little Rose-water, and a Lair of unbeaten Clouts, with Sugar between …
— A New and Easy Method of Cookery by Elizabeth Cleland, 1755
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January 6, 2025
The rape gangs in Britain were enabled and protected by “good people” who didn’t want to be accused of racism
Tom at The Last Ditch confesses his early complicity with the official culture of silence that protected and encouraged the exploitation of girls and young women in Britain for decades:
Everyone who ever participated in the leftist orthodoxy of identity-politics is to blame for the near-total impunity of the Muslim rape gangs in Britain. As I reported here, when I was a young solicitor in Nottingham, a police sergeant told me I was “part of the problem.” I had a choice between believing what he told me about “honour killings” in that city or preserving my good standing as an anti-racist liberal. I chose the latter. I feared my career prospects and social standing would be jeopardised (they would have been) if I accepted his honest account. I called a good man a racist (mentally equating him with the likes of Nick Griffin and recoiling in fear from the association) when he was just horrified (as any decent human should be) by young women being murdered.
In that moment, I very much was “part of the problem” and I am profoundly ashamed of that. It is fortunate that – unlike the politicians, local councillors, social-workers and police officers who should have brought the rape gangs or the “honour” killers to justice (or prevented both phenomena altogether) – I had no occasion ever to make any real life choices on the matter. I believe – faced with actual evidence – I would have made better ones, but the way I failed the good sergeant’s test that long-ago day in the early 1980s proves I would have wanted to look the other way, just as they actually did.
I am not still playing the stupid rainbows and unicorns game of cultural moral equivalence (still less the foul Critical Race Theory game of cultural moral hierarchy) when I make the point that the young white working class girls in our cities have not been the only victims of multiculturalism. Those murdered Muslim girls who (so the sergeant told me) had paraffin poured over them and were burned to death were victims too. It was racist to refuse to consider that their Muslim dads, uncles and brothers might murder them because of their primitive religious and cultural notions. It was racist for our authorities to treat Muslim men who gang-raped white girls differently than they would have treated others. It was racist to cover up these horrors in order to protect the myth – shamefully repeated just days ago in his annual Christmas message by His Majesty the King – that multiculturalism has been an overall benefit to Britain.
Some of us have been making these points as best we can for a long time. Many of us had given up, if we’re honest. It was clear that the official narrative that we were racists and that these stories were disinformation – a “moral panic” as Wikipedia puts it – was going to prevail. Until recently the key social media market of ideas – Twitter – was controlled by the Left and attempts to raise the issue were likely to be memory-holed by their private sector woke equivalent of Orwell’s MiniTru.
Miraculously, Elon Musk – a modern Edison, with plenty to occupy him besides our concerns about free speech – bought Twitter and (in one of history’s greatest acts of philanthropy) set it free at his own personal expense. He told advertisers who sought to maintain its old Newspeak regime to “go fuck themselves.” Miraculously he got involved in the issue not just in America (where the Constitution gives him some basis for hope) but in Britain too.
My British Constitution textbook at law school illustrated the supremacy of our Parliament by jokingly saying that it could – in law – make a man into a woman. Little did its authors know that dimwit politicians would later prove the educational point of their joke by making it real. Our constitution – as a result of centuries of struggle with the monarchy, which Parliament decisively won – can be summarised in just three words – “Parliament is supreme”
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