World War Two
Published 17 Dec 2022This war has now lasted as long as the Great War did, but there’s no signs of it slowing. The Soviets have three offensives going on on the Eastern Front, in Italy the Allies are attacking at San Pietro and over the Moro River, in the Pacific there are Allied landings on New Britain, but in Pacific Command, the big talk is all about a new super bomber.
(more…)
December 18, 2022
A Super Bomber to Break Japan – WW2 – 225 – December 17, 1943
Comments Off on A Super Bomber to Break Japan – WW2 – 225 – December 17, 1943
Christopher Snowden reviews Andrew Doyle’s The New Puritans
In The Critic, Christopher Snowden praises Doyle’s recent book:
How wrong I was. As Andrew Doyle shows in The New Puritans, it took only a few years for Critical Social Justice to infect the corporate world, government agencies and the media. Most worryingly for a system of thought that favours “lived experience” over objective truth, it became pervasive in higher and lower education.
Doyle had been warning about this for years and kept the receipts. He has a long list of examples of institutional idiocy and persecution to show that there is more to concerns about the “woke brigade” than a right-wing panic over a handful of crazies.
So divorced from reality is Critical Social Justice, that unintentional humour often arises: the CEO of Stonewall accusing lesbians who refuse to date trans women of “sexual racism”; activists becoming uncomfortable with the phrase “trigger warning” because it invokes guns; an American professor of education asserting that “on many levels, mathematics itself operates as whiteness” (how many levels?).
[…]
Those of us who will never be intimately acquainted with the Frankfurt School owe a debt to Doyle for calmly dissecting the anti-liberal worldview. Doyle himself is a left-wing homosexual who is often portrayed as a Nazi on social media for defending free speech and mocking the “entitled demands and infantile tantrums” of the woke mob.
Borrowing a phrase from Isaiah Berlin, he argues that we are living through a “Counter-Enlightenment” led by “conformists with pretensions of radicalism”. The woke ideology is not a natural extension of left-liberalism, he says, nor of political correctness. It is something far more sinister, regressive and authoritarian. In its Year Zero approach to knowledge and history, it is almost nihilistic.
Academically rigorous but never pretentious, The New Puritans is virtually unimprovable as an analysis of this chilling social phenomenon. It begins and ends with the Salem witch trials of 1692–93, when two vindictive children sent 20 people to their deaths on the basis of nothing more than “spectral evidence” (AKA “lived experience”). The mania ended as quickly as it began when the adults in the room simply stopped believing them.
Doyle believes the current madness will end the same way if we can return to critical thinking and put a stop to ad hominem attacks. Good luck with that. Most of the people he is writing about would sooner burn this book than read it.
Comments Off on Christopher Snowden reviews Andrew Doyle’s The New Puritans
December 17, 2022
The RAF’s Worst Day of the War – War Against Humanity 091
World War Two
Published 15 Dec 2022The United Nations Allies has some success bombing the Nazi German Reich, but it comes at a heavy price. In the village Kalavryta in Greece, the Wehrmacht massacre hundreds of men and boys.
(more…)
Comments Off on The RAF’s Worst Day of the War – War Against Humanity 091
QotD: The female murderer
Each volume of Notable British Trials came with a lengthy introduction by its editor, many of whom were distinguished writers — for example, William Roughead, the originator of the true-crime genre and much admired by Henry James; or F. Tennyson Jesse, the poet’s great-niece, a good novelist and author of a wonderful study of murderers, Murder and Its Motives, which remains in use. She wrote with cool irony about the worst crime in the criminal code; she says, for instance, of some women murderers:
The woman who murders her husband has nearly always ceased to think of him as such, and cannot really believe that he ever stood in that relationship towards her. It is only a tiresome insistence on the part of the law that makes her drastic step necessary. She loves another man who is her husband “in the sight of God”, and it is to her both unreasonable and indecent that the first man should be obstructing her path.
Jesse writes things that I think would nowadays call down upon her all the anathemata of which right-thinking intellectuals are capable. In describing the trial of a Mrs. Carew, who poisoned her husband in order to join her illicit lover, Jesse says:
Her counsel made a point that did not succeed in weighing the scales in her favour … but which shows him to have been a man of some penetration in the matter of female psychology. He said: “It must be borne in mind that a woman never thinks it wrong for a man to be in love with her”, and when he said that he said something profoundly true. A woman may think it shows a lack of pride, utter shamelessness, complete lack of all decent feeling for another woman to be in love with her husband, but she will always feel convinced that it is a sign of something nice and perspicacious in a man for him to be in love with her.
This was written in 1924. Subsequently, it seems to me, male psychology has — in this regard, anyway — become feminized; what once applied specially to women now applies equally to men.
Theodore Dalrymple, “A Quiet Evening’s Reading: Notable British Trials is as complete an inventory of human depravity as has ever been assembled”, City Journal, 2018-06-24.
Comments Off on QotD: The female murderer
December 16, 2022
Tank Chat #161 Samaritan and Sultan | The Tank Museum
The Tank Museum
Published 19 Aug 2022Do you know why the Museum’s Samaritan has a red cross painted on it? Join Historian David Fletcher and discover this and more for the latest Tank Chat on Samaritan and Sultan.
(more…)
Comments Off on Tank Chat #161 Samaritan and Sultan | The Tank Museum
December 15, 2022
Christmas in the WWI Trenches – Xmas Rations
Tasting History with Max Miller
Published 13 Dec 2022
Comments Off on Christmas in the WWI Trenches – Xmas Rations
“Intense staring” aka the “Toxic Male Gaze” on the London Underground
Jennie Cummings-Knight on a recent publicity campaign to discourage male passengers on the London Underground from “intense staring”:
“London underground” by @Doug88888 is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0 
.
… there might be reasons that a man stares intensely without sexual intent. For example, he could have autism and not really understand his behaviour might be considered as “staring”. Or he might be short sighted, or daydreaming about his holiday. Moreover, London Transport trains are used by people of all kinds from all over the world, including ordinary people from countries where staring is not seen as threatening e.g. in Spain. Indeed people in the UK are relatively comfortable with eye-contact, though those from outside London might not be aware that in the confined spaces of the London Underground “tube” trains, people tend to be unusually sensitive to eye contact. Although London Transport’s idea may be well intentioned, it doesn’t seem to take these individual and cultural differences into account. Perhaps its main effect will be to make women excessively worried about being stared at, and make men excessively worried about being jailed for accidentally looking at a woman in the “wrong” way.
But there are many layers to this issue. Speaking as a woman, I am always fascinated by the double standards exhibited by women with respect to male behaviour. We are only interested in being looked at by men if we find the said man or men to be attractive to us. This means that we can be potentially offended by the gaze of any man who falls into the following short list:
- Men we don’t know
- Men who we don’t find attractive
- Men who we feel are “punching above their weight” with regard to giving us their attention in this way
At the same time, the curious paradox is that, in spite of our assertions that we don’t need male attention (see the Toy Story 4 Bo Beep character, developed by feminist writers) and that we want to be taken seriously as we pursue our careers, we still take a lot of trouble to look attractive to men. This behaviour can start very young and persist into later adulthood. Teenage girls growing up in the 2000s are still hitching up their skirt waistbands as they come out of school on an afternoon. Teenage girls clubbing at the weekend still dress as provocatively as possible (if the ones I see on late night trains on a regular basis are anything to go by). Why dress in this way if we don’t want to be looked at?
I would suggest that the need to be seen by the male is deeply wired in the subconscious of most women. Sadly, girls as young as 9 years old are worrying about the shape of their intimate private parts. The fact is that women are having more cosmetic procedures than ever before in order to look the most attractive that they can. Men are having more cosmetic procedures too, but not to the same degree. Women who are only attracted to women seem, in my experience, to be less concerned with their physical attractiveness per se and more concerned with dressing in a way that fits in with lesbian group culture.
If we truly believe that we are liberated females, how is it that we are still so obsessed with having the perfect body/and or face? Where does this female need “to be seen” come from? On one level, what they do not realise is that they are looking for “ideal shapes” imagined at least in part, by the porn industry. On another level, if we look at evolutionary history, we see that male and female roles are rooted in survival behaviours appropriate to a hunter/gatherer society, and to the safe nurturing of children. The men were the hunters looking out for prey, and women were tied closer to the homestead because of child rearing. The more inward “yin” role for women, arising from their nurturing role and the physicality of the growth of the baby inside the woman’s body, followed by the nourishment in the early months from her body for the baby, has resulted in women being especially responsive to touch.
Men on the other hand, tend to be more visually aroused, and have an inborn, primeval need to look outwards (the outward thrusting nature of “yang”) which includes looking at the female. In the same way, the need to look around the field when hunting results in looking at whatever is in their peripheral vision. It is simply not possible for a man to stop looking at women unless he goes against this instinctive behaviour and keeps his eyes to the ground. If he does this, he may then also miss other visual cues which give him important information about dangers around and in front of him.
Comments Off on “Intense staring” aka the “Toxic Male Gaze” on the London Underground
December 14, 2022
The Polish Armed Forces in Exile
World War Two
Published 13 Dec 2022The Polish state was the first to fall in this war, yet across the globe Polish soldiers are fighting on land, air, and sea as part of the United Nations alliance. The story of the tens of thousands of men and women fighting for Polish liberation is equal parts hope and hardship as they battle the enemy and even sometimes their own allies.
(more…)
Comments Off on The Polish Armed Forces in Exile
December 12, 2022
The British Empire(s)
At Spiked, James Heartfield discusses the changing attitudes toward British imperial history:
Renewed interest in the history of the British Empire has generated a great amount of fascinating research and reflection. Over the past decade or more, there have been many books written about the empire – popular, academic, polemical and picaresque. There has been Akala’s Natives, William Dalrymple’s The Anarchy, Shashi Tharoor’s Inglorious Empire and Caroline Elkins’ Legacy of Violence, to name just a few.
Today’s approach to the British Empire is invariably critical – often stridently so. It marks a change to the attitude widely held half a century ago, when books on the empire tended to be elegiac farewells, like Paul Scott’s novel, The Jewel in the Crown, or Jan Morris’s Pax Britannica. Today’s critical approach to the empire is certainly a far cry from that which prevailed for a brief moment around the time that Margaret Thatcher was taking back the Falkland Islands. Back then, there was even an attempt at the moral rehabilitation of the empire.
[…]
But there are downsides to the self-excoriating criticism of Britain’s past. Often this approach to history turns into a debilitating exercise in self-loathing, an act of guilt-mongering. Many others have pointed out the limitations of this kind of morbid raking over the coals. But what is just as worrying is that the more we posture over Britain’s colonial past, the less we seem to understand it.
The moralistic framework in which we teach and discuss colonial history reduces our understanding to a single note of complaint. Hence, many historians today now write as if they have to make a case against the empire. This is just kicking at an open door. The empire has very few champions today. And the great British public is certainly not nostalgic for its return, despite some commentators arguing otherwise. Indeed, an ever growing majority think that the empire was a bad thing.
There is another problem with this approach to Britain’s colonial past. It situates readers outside of history. It encourages them to adopt a moralistic rather than historical approach to colonialism. They can do little more than judge the empire as evil. And in doing so, it flattens out the different periods of the colonial project into one long uniform timeline of subjugation. Collapsing distinct periods and stages together leads to a great confusion. For instance, in many accounts, there appears to be little difference between 18th-century British colonialism, which was dominated by slave trading, and the British colonialism of the late 19th century, which was marked by anti-slavery. It is important not to reduce the long history of the empire to a single motivating cause, be it the “English genius” of earlier celebratory accounts or today’s contention that it was all driven by “white supremacy”.
I seek to address these problems in my new book, Britain’s Empires: A History, 1600-2020. There I draw out the differences between the distinctive stages of Britain’s colonial history.
To do this, it is necessary to step back from moral judgement, which foregrounds our attitudes today, in order to try to understand what motivated people back then. That often means looking at a society’s changing social and economic organisation. Britain’s Empires is a history of the empire that holds on to a sense of historical change, and tries to understand the interrelation of its component parts.
The distinct eras of British colonialism are: the Old Colonialism (1600 to 1776); the Empire of Free Trade (1776-1870); the New Colonialism (1870-1945); and the period of decolonisation during the Cold War era (1946-1989). Britain’s Empires ends with an account of the “humanitarian imperialism” of the 1990s up until the present day. This periodisation aims to reflect the objective moments of transition.
Comments Off on The British Empire(s)
QotD: Oversensitivity is not constrained by the mere passage of time
It seems a reader of the Mercury ran across a brief news item about the suicide of a 16-year-old girl in its pages, and was horrified at the sensational, detailed nature of the report. The story described Dorothy Balchin as being “of a reserved and morbid disposition” and described the romantic disappointment — a beau’s emigration to Australia — that preceded her suicide. The newspaper noted that a photograph of her boyfriend was found immediately below her hanged body, and even printed the text of two notes she left. In other words, the news copy broke every rule that newspapers now normally observe in mentioning suicide.
But of course no one had thought of any of those rules in the year 1912.
Which is when the story had appeared in the Mercury.
Which didn’t stop some reader from complaining to the paper in the year 2019.
Colby Cosh, “Want a newspaper job? Dream of making films? Be careful what you wish for”, National Post, 2019-05-09.
Comments Off on QotD: Oversensitivity is not constrained by the mere passage of time
December 11, 2022
Apparently building a new coal mine ranks as a “crime against humanity”
Brendan O’Neill in Spiked on the latest peak in climate hysteria (although it’s tough to bet against hysterics finding an even higher peak to climb):
An image of coal pits in the Black Country from Griffiths’ Guide to the iron trade of Great Britain, 1873.
Image digitized by the Robarts Library of the University of Toronto via Wikimedia Commons.
The madness of the greens is peaking. This week a leading eco-politician in the UK, Caroline Lucas of the Green Party, referred to the building of a new coalmine as a “crime against humanity”. Take that in. Once upon a time it was mass murder, extermination, enslavement and the forced deportation of a people that were considered crimes against humanity. Now the building of a mine in Cumbria in north-west England that will create 500 new jobs and produce 2.8million tonnes of coal a year is referred to in such terms. Perhaps the coalmine bosses should be packed off to The Hague. Maybe the men who’ll dig the coal should be forced alongside the likes of ISIS to account for their genocidal behaviour.
We cannot let Ms Lucas’s crazed comments just slide by. We need to reflect on how we arrived at a situation where a mainstream politician, one feted by the media establishment, can liken digging for coal to crimes of extermination. It was in the Guardian – where else? – that Ms Lucas made her feverish claims. On Wednesday, when the government gave the go-ahead to the Cumbria mine, the first new coalmine in Britain for 30 years, Lucas wrote that the whole thing is “truly terrible”. This “climate-busting, backward-looking coalmine” is nothing short of a “climate crime against humanity”, she said.
It isn’t though, is it? Sorry to be pedantic but it is not a crime to extract coal from the earth. If it were, the leaders of China – where they produce 13million tonnes of coal a day, rather putting into perspective the Cumbria mine’s 2.8million tonnes a year – would be languishing in the clink. I look forward to Ms Lucas performing a citizen’s arrest on Xi Jinping. It certainly is not a crime against humanity. That term entered popular usage during the Nuremberg trials of the Nazis. It refers to an act of evil of such enormity that it can be seen as an assault on all of humankind. Earth to Ms Lucas: extracting coal to make steel – what the Cumbria coal will mostly be used for – is not an affront to humankind. I’ll tell you what is an affront, though: speaking about the burning of coal in the same language that is used to refer to the burning of human beings. That, Caroline, is despicable.
The overwrought apocalypticism of the likes of Ms Lucas does two bad things. First, it demonises in the most hysterical fashion perfectly normal and in fact good endeavours. The Cumbria coalmine will create hundreds of well-paid jobs. It will increase the independence and dignity of working-class families in Cumbria. It will help to reduce the UK’s reliance on coal imports. These are positives. They should be celebrated. Of course to Ms Lucas and other middle-class greens, that local communities in Cumbria have welcomed the coalmine only shows that they’re “nostalgic” for the past and that they’ve been “seduced” by a plan that will actually make them “suffer”. Patronising much? The Cumbrian working classes who can’t wait to start mining are a paragon of reason in comparison with the Guardianistas madly sobbing about coal being a crime against humanity.
Comments Off on Apparently building a new coal mine ranks as a “crime against humanity”
An Amphibious Landing to take Rome? – 224 – December 10, 1943
World War Two
Published 10 Dec 2022There are plans afoot to hit the enemy from behind in Italy. Allied leaders are meeting again in Cairo to go over other plans, notably what to do about China and Burma. There is active fighting on two fronts in Italy too, though this week it doesn’t go particularly well for the Allies. Attacks in the USSR are unsuccessful for the Soviets, but do go well for the Germans, and there are Allied attacks by air in the Marshall Islands and over France.
(more…)
Comments Off on An Amphibious Landing to take Rome? – 224 – December 10, 1943
Winter of Discontent 2, non-electric boogaloo?
Matt Goodwin sets the stage for Britain’s potential re-run of the “Winter of Discontent”. By chance, I happened to be in England for a few weeks smack-dab in the middle of the worst of that winter, so although I was not following the news at the time, the physical and emotional state of the country struck me very deeply. There certainly are strong similarities between late 1970s Britain and post-pandemic Britain:
Conservative Party election poster, 1979.
Britain is entering a Winter of Discontent. If you are in the country and plan to take a train, a bus, a flight, a driving test, travel on the highway, send a letter, have a beer, go to school or university, need an ambulance to take you to hospital, need a nurse to look after you while you are in hospital or want to buy a coffin in case things do not go so well while you are in hospital then there is more than a good chance you will be caught up in a wave of strikes that are sweeping across the country.
More than one million working days are about to be lost due to strike action, the largest number since 1989. This is nowhere near the twelve million days that were lost in the original Winter of Discontent, in 1978-9, or the 126 million days lost during the general strike in 1926. But it is more than enough to cause yet another problem for Rishi Sunak and the faltering Conservative Party he is struggling to turn around.
As I pointed out in the Sunday Times last week, while Sunak has stabilised his party it remains deeply unpopular in the country. Even before this winter, voters blame the Tories far more than global events for Britain’s deteriorating economy. One legacy of Partygate and the disastrous experiment with Trussonomics is that Sunak has inherited a party that is now seen by much of the electorate as untrustworthy, serving its own interests, in the hands of a narrow elite and out of touch. Today, not even one in ten voters think the Conservatives “care about ordinary people”.
What options does Sunak have? While he and his team will be tempted to recycle the Thatcher playbook from the original Winter of Discontent, blaming the unions for the strikes and trying to appeal to national unity, this time things are more complicated. For a start, large numbers of voters actually support the strikes, which reduces Sunak’s room for manoeuvre. Second, this time it is the Conservatives not Labour who are in power, and are being blamed just as much as the unions for the unfolding chaos. Every train that is missed, every flight that is cancelled, every hospital patient that is not looked after will entrench the party’s negative image. And, third, as I said during an after dinner talk to clients of a major law firm this week, irrespective of what happens in the weeks ahead research on the impact of major strikes tells a consistent story: they hurt incumbent governments, lowering their support at the next election.
In fact, this might explain why the Rishi recovery already appears to be running out of steam. As I pointed out on Twitter this week, since taking over Sunak has certainly managed to increase his party’s average share of the vote from 23 to 27 per cent while Labour’s average lead in the polls has dropped from thirty to twenty points. And when voters are asked who would make the “best prime minister”, Sunak is much closer to Starmer, trailing him by only 5-points, than Liz Truss ever was, who trailed him by 29-points. But the Conservatives remain a long, long way behind. Just how far behind was underlined by a by-election in Chester this week which saw the party’s vote crash by sixteen points. The last time this happened at a by-election in a Labour-held seat was in the 1990s, shortly before the Blair asteroid almost rendered the Tories extinct.
At a deeper level, however, this winter also looks set to entrench a much deeper mood among the British people which will also undermine the government. The strikes, the chaos, the mounting sense of crisis are all feeding a palpable feeling among voters that nothing really works in Britain anymore, that contrary to the populist mantra of the last decade nobody is in control.
Comments Off on Winter of Discontent 2, non-electric boogaloo?
How to Make A Christmas Cake – The Victorian Way
English Heritage
Published 30 Nov 2017Christmas is approaching so Mrs Crocombe is making a cake for Lord and Lady Braybrooke at Audley End House.
This traditional plum cake is based on a recipe by Charles Francatelli, who was Queen Victoria’s chief cook from 1840 to 1841.
(more…)
Comments Off on How to Make A Christmas Cake – The Victorian Way
December 10, 2022
Ed West finds nice-ish things to say about the French
It’s actually part two, which I’m sure would astonish many a Brit:
The Royal Standard of the King of France (and by default, the national flag), used between 1638 and 1790.
Wikimedia Commons.
“When, after their victory at Salamis, the generals of the various Greek states voted the prizes for distinguished individual merit, each assigned the first place of excellence to himself, but they all concurred in giving their second votes to Themistocles,” wrote the great 19th-century historian Edward Creasy. “This was looked on as a decisive proof that Themistocles ought to be ranked first of all. If we were to endeavour, by a similar test, to ascertain which European nation has contributed the most to the progress of European civilization, we should find Italy, Germany, England, and Spain, each claiming the first degree, but each also naming France as clearly next in merit. It is impossible to deny her paramount importance in history.”
France is central to the story of Europe, and indeed of Britain. It is almost impossible to understand England’s history without appreciating the relationship with its closest continental neighbour. It is a love-hate affair originating in a grand inferiority complex, a long rivalry that continues tomorrow [Saturday] when England meet France in the World Cup quarter-finals.
In a piece last year I cited some of the most endearing/maddening things about the French, all of which contributed to a sense of amused frustration on our part:
Only in France would football fans protest that a local restaurant had lost a Michelin Star, as happened in Lyon two years ago. Only in France would an expedition to the Himalayas — of huge national importance — fail because it was weighed down by eight tonnes of supplies, including 36 bottles of champagne and “countless” tins of foie gras. And only in France would you get actual wine terrorists, the Comité Régional d’Action Viticole, who have bombed shops, wineries and other things responsible for importing foreign produce. This is a country which only reluctantly in the 1950s stopped giving school children a nutritious drink for their health, by which the French meant not milk but cider.
This is a country where mistresses are so much part of life that they can legally inherit, and where murder doesn’t really count if it’s done for love. One of France’s most famous socialites, Henriette Caillaux, shot dead the editor of Le Figaro just before the First World War and received just four months in jail because it was a crime passionnel. So that’s all right then.
But there are so many other things to love about our strange neighbours …
The Anglo-French relationship is a difficult one, reflected in the troubled history of royal marriages. Charles I’s Catholic wife Henrietta Maria was a drag on his popularity among excitable Protestant radicals, and turned out to be the last French consort; in the 14th century Edward II’s wife Isabella overthrew him and, perhaps, conspired to have him killed, after a rocky marriage that began badly when he brought his lover to the coronation and acted inappropriately affectionate towards him. But then, as Edith Cresson pointed out, this is to be expected when you marry an Englishman.
In 1514 Louis XII married an English bride, Henry VIII’s sister Mary; she was 18, he was 53, and had syphilis, so she must have been delighted about the whole thing; however, within weeks she had “danced him to death”, the sex apparently proving too exciting for his nervous system. Francesco Vettori, Florence’s ambassador to Rome, wrote that King Louis had a lady “so young, so beautiful and so swift that she had ridden him right out of the world”.
***
Perhaps not a terrible way for a Frenchman to go, and not the last French head of state to die in a similar manner. President Félix Faure expired in 1899 while with his mistress, after which his funeral featured this very understated carriage.
***
Numerous French presidents have had affairs, although Francois Mitterrand actually had a secret second family while in the Élysée Palace. Mitterrand’s last meal was also ultra-French: “He’d eaten oysters and foie gras and capon — all in copious quantities — the succulent, tender, sweet tastes flooding his parched mouth. And then there was the meal’s ultimate course: a small, yellow-throated songbird that was illegal to eat. Rare and seductive, the bird — ortolan — supposedly represented the French soul. And this old man, this ravenous president, had taken it whole — wings, feet, liver, heart. Swallowed it, bones and all. Consumed it beneath a white cloth so that God Himself couldn’t witness the barbaric act.”
***
The French are world outliers in their attitudes to adultery, the only country where a majority of people think it’s fine. Germany is number two in this index of permissiveness while the Americans, of course, are the most disapproving western nation.
Comments Off on Ed West finds nice-ish things to say about the French
