Forgotten Weapons
Published 7 Apr 2023When the Bundeswehr was formed, it chose to simply continue using the MG42 as its standard GPMG. This was initially done by converting older MG42s to 7.62x51mm NATO as the MG1 (adopted in 1958), but progressed to production of a brand new version of the gun by Rheinmetall (adopted in 1968). The MG3 included improvements to the belt feed system, added integral antiaircraft sights, and allowed a rate of fire between 700 and 1300 rpm depending on the choice in bolt, buffer and booster. It was the standard German MG until finally being replaced by the MG5 in 2012 — and it is/was in use by nearly 4 dozen other countries as well. Today we are going to compare this transferrable, C&R MG3 to an original MG42 to see the improvements that were made.
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July 14, 2023
MG-3: Germany Modernizes the Classic MG-42
July 13, 2023
Bill Slim’s plan for the Battle of Meiktila in March 1945
Dr. Robert Lyman on the subject of his most recent book, The Reconquest of Burma 1944-45: From Operation Capital to the Sittang Bend:
When I was writing my latest book with General Lord Dannatt he said to me, “Rob, if I’ve got one criticism of A War of Empires it’s that you don’t emphasise enough the role of Bill Slim in coming up with the plan for victory in 1945, and executing it perfectly.” Fair. As Slim’s military biographer, I told Richard that I didn’t want to be accused of rewriting that book again. I was conscious of this problem as I was writing A War of Empires.
But it is fair criticism. It may be that I underplayed Slim’s role when I was considering all the other critical features in this great campaign. The idea behind the dramatic victory by 14th Army in Burma in 1945 was Slim’s and Slim’s alone. He pursued his own plan through to its remarkable conclusion.
[…]
Slim’s original plan was to fight the main strength of the Japanese army on the Shwebo Plain, a dry, flat plain between the loops of the Chindwin and Irrawaddy. Not only would the terrain be well suited to the deployment of armour, for which the Japanese had little effective reply, but the Japanese would be trapped with the river-line at their back. Slim had assumed that the Japanese would be unprepared to make a voluntary withdrawal. The scene was set for Slim to be able to deploy his superior mobility and firepower to destroy the main Japanese army in Burma.
By the end of the year, however, it became apparent that the Japanese were not going to conform to Slim’s plan for the battle, and General Kimura had seen the trap which his forces would be caught in if they attempted to stand and fight in the Shwebo Plain. Showing unusual flexibility and moral courage Kimura promptly withdrew his reconstituted 15th Army behind the Irrawaddy. Kimura hoped, not without reason, to be able to smash Slim’s army as it attempted to cross the river, which in itself presented an immense obstacle to the British. He would then counter-attack and destroy Slim as the British withdrew during the monsoon to the Chindwin.
Kimura’s move behind the Irrawaddy destroyed at a stroke Slim’s plan. Undaunted, and recognising the supreme importance of destroying Kimura’s army rather than taking ground for its own sake, Slim came up with another plan. In basic outline, his new plan (Operation Extended Capital) entailed crossing the Irrawaddy and fighting the decisive battle in February in the plain around Mandalay and the low hills around Meiktila, the key enemy air and supply base in Central Burma. Both the road and rail links between Mandalay and Rangoon ran through Meiktila. If Meiktila fell, the whole structure of the Japanese defence of Central Burma would collapse.
“… if Ukraine were to join NATO in the middle of a war, then congrats – most of Europe and North America are at war”
As I’ve said several times, I have great sympathy for ordinary Ukrainians caught up in a war not of their making, but I’m not a fan of the awesomely corrupt Ukrainian government. NATO nations providing weapons, ammunition, and training is fine, but in no way is Ukraine ready to become a member of the alliance and will not be until after this war is over and they conduct a very significant set of anti-corruption reforms in their national government. CDR Salamander points out the insanity of western pundits demanding that NATO add Ukraine to the alliance in the middle of a major war:
I understand the desire for Ukraine — and others for that matter — to be part of NATO. I also understand why the frontline states in Central Europe such as the Baltics republics and Visegrad Group would like Ukraine in as well. Defense in depth and long fronts are a thing.
As much as I can sympathize with the above, I also understand the reasons that Ukraine and other nations may never be right for NATO membership, or at best be a decade or two out. Single points of failure triggers to another world war — where every new member state increases the aggregate risk to all members — is not a minor thing to consider.
There is also the very real fact that Ukraine is in a war right now, for her an existential war with Russia. This CNN article is a perfect example of some of the absolutely foolish questions people are even considering right now. I’m not even going to quote from it as there are dozens like it out as the NATO summit is going on. It is a waste of your time.
You don’t need to be an international lawyer to understand that if Ukraine were to join NATO in the middle of a war, then congrats — most of Europe and North America are at war. As history tells us, when Europe and North America goes to war, eventually the world joins in.
For today’s post, I’d like to pull some quotes from a superb Financial Times article, NATO’s dilemma: what to do about Ukraine’s bid to join?
Membership represents the long-term security that Kyiv wants and was promised 15 years ago. But Russia’s war has complicated things
When Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy strides into Nato’s annual summit in Vilnius on Wednesday, his country will have been fighting a full-scale war of survival against Russia for 503 days.
2008, in the last year of the Bush-43 administration. The year it looked like we had Iraq stabilized yet were already planning to take the keys in Afghanistan back from NATO after the alliance culminated in the summer of 2007.
The year of imperial overreach in denial;
It was over breakfast in Bucharest in 2008 that the seeds of Nato’s current dilemma were sown.
At an early morning meeting on the second day of the alliance’s summit that year, then secretary-general Jaap de Hoop Scheffer met with US president George W Bush and his French and German counterparts Nicolas Sarkozy and Angela Merkel.
The outcome of that breakfast, and a result of Merkel softening her opposition to Bush’s proposal to offer membership to Ukraine and Georgia, was a statement by the entire Nato alliance.
Both countries “will become members of Nato”, it said, without providing a timeline. That declaration, at the same time both unequivocal and non-committal, was hailed as a major achievement. It has since sunk into infamy.
Amazing how people forget that other nations get a vote. Your actions will cause reactions by those who either think they will benefit from or be endangered by them. Roll that simple context in to the 1,000 year record of people west of the Vistula misreading Russia and you have this;
Four months later Putin’s tanks rolled into northern Georgia. In 2014 his special forces annexed Ukraine’s Crimean peninsula. Nato, as Putin knew well, refuses to accept new members with “frozen conflict” on their territory. Aside from condemnatory rhetoric, Nato did little to punish Moscow. Putin, who had been present at the Bucharest summit as a guest, had called Nato’s bluff.
Putin was right. No one will join NATO who has border disputes or are best known for their globe-spanning corruption.
NATO and the USA’s natsec “blob” was, again, wrong. Being wrong isn’t the problem. It is an imperfect business where mistakes are going to be made. The important thing is to learn from them and if the same people and institutions are perpetually wrong, you get new people and institutions to help you make decisions. That is the danger. It isn’t that we “remember everything but learn nothing” it is more that we “remember only what confirms our priors and only learn to try harder next time.”
QotD: The Annales school of history
The Annales school is a style of historical thinking that emerged in France in the early 1900s; at least for pre-modernists, the dominating figures here tend to be Marc Bloch and Fernand Braudel. It got its name because of its close association with Annales d’Historie Economique et Sociale. Fundamentally, what sets the Annales approach apart is first its focus and then the methods that focus demands.
The big shift in focus for the Annales school was an interest in charting the experience of society below the level of elites (though the elites are not abandoned either), what is sometimes termed “history from below”, as distinct from traditional elite-centered “great man” history or the more deterministic Marxist models of history at the time. You can see the political implications, of course, in the very early 1900s, of declaring the common man worthy of study; this is generally a history from the left but not the extreme left. That focus in turn demanded new approaches because it turned the focus of social history towards people who by and large do not write to us.
In reaching for that experience, Annales scholars tended to frame their thinking in terms of la longue durée (“the long run”); history was composed of three parts: événements (“events”), conjonctures (“circumstances”) and finally la longue durée itself. Often in English this gets rendered as a distinction between “events” (kings, wars, politics, crises) and “structures” (economics, social thought and at a deeper level climate, ecology, and geography). What Annales scholars tended to argue was that those structures were often more important than the events that traditional historians studied: the farmer’s life was far more shaped by very long-term factors like the local ecology, the organization of his farming village, the economic structure of the region and so on. And then the idea goes, that by charting those structures, you can figure things out about the lives of those farmers even if you don’t have many – or any – of those farmers writing to you.
Important to this was the idea of enduring patterns of thought within a society, what Bloch termed mentalités (“mentalities”, like longue durée, this is a technical term usually used in French to make that fact clear). Mentalités – Bloch’s original example was the idea that kings had a holy healing touch, but this could be almost any kind of social construct or pattern of ideas (indeed, one critique of it is that the notion of mentalités is broad and ill-defined) – can last a long time and can inform or constrain the actions of many actors within a society; think of how successive generations of kings can have their decisions shaped or constrained by their societies view – their own view – of kingship. That view of kingship might be more impactful than any one king and so pervasive that even a king would struggle to change it.
So how does this influence my work? I tend to be very much a “history from below” kind of historian, interested in charting the experience of regular farmers, soldiers, weavers and so on. The distinction between the long-term structures that shape life and the short-term events that populate our history is very valuable to think with, especially for identifying when an event alters a structure, because those tend to be very important events indeed. And I think a keen attention to the way people thought about things in the past and how those mentalités can be different than ours is very important.
That said, the Annales stress on mentalités has in some ways been overtaken by more data-driven historical methods on the one hand or a strong emphasis on local or individual experience (“microhistory”) on the other. Mentalités tend to be very big picture, asking how, say, “the French” thought about something over a period of decades or centuries and seeking to know how that shaped their experience. But archaeology, demographics or economic data can reveal patterns of behavior which might not correspond to the mentalités that show up in written texts; this is fundamentally the interaction that informs the “revenge of the archaeologists” in the study of the ancient economy, for instance. On the other hand, not everyone in that big group thinks the same and a microhistory of an individual or a single village might reveal telling local variations not captured in massive-scale structures.
Fortunately, historians do not need to be doctrinaire in our use of theory, we don’t have to pick one and stick to it. Different projects also lend themselves to different approaches. I think the Annales school offers a lot of really useful tools to have my historian’s toolbox, but they sit alongside military theory, archaeological material culture studies methods, philological approaches, a smattering of economic and demographic tools, etc.
Bret Devereaux, “Referenda ad Senatum: January 13, 2023: Roman Traditionalism, Ancient Dates and Imperial Spies”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2023-01-13.
July 12, 2023
Nazi drone war begins – War Against Humanity 103
World War Two
Published 11 Jul 2023Bombing enemy civilians does nothing to advance a nation’s war effort. But now, Adolf Hitler believes that the V-1 flying bomb, the first of the Vengeance Weapons, will bring London to its knees and unite the German population behind the war effort as never before. The missiles are ready for launch and thousands more civilians will die to satisfy the Führer’s
delusions.
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QotD: Media gullibility on military issues
The Media, of course, does not do this. They’d be happy to write up a whole big feature story about how the Russians’ Q-35 matter modulator wasn’t nearly what Vlad Putin, that lying bastard, bragged it up to be. And with the new Lepage gun gluing all those Russian planes together, the brave Ukrainians will be in Moscow for Easter!
Are they lying? Not really. Some very serious-looking persyn in a snazzy uniform with a lot of very colorful ribbons told them that the Q-35 matter modulator isn’t all that, and why would some brave freedom fighter lie to them? And besides — this is crucial — “fact checking” the stats on the Q-35 matter modulator would entail that you’ve never heard of it before …
… which is anathema to our intrepid reporterette’s sense of xzhyrself as a hard-hitting newshound who is very very Smart. After all, she scored a 35,000 on her SATs and graduated from the Assjammer School of Journalism with a 9.98 GPA. She’s got fellowships and awards and whatnot out the yingyang, plus 1.2 million Twitter followers. And it says “war correspondent” right there on her Facebook page. If the Q-35 matter modulator weren’t actually a thing, surely she would know.
Severian, “The Becky Cycle”, Founding Questions, 2023-02-27.
July 10, 2023
“De-banking” is the financial world’s version of cancelling someone
At the Free Life blog, Alan Bickley considers the recently reported rash of prominent (and not-so-prominent) critics of the British government being refused service by their banks and further refused permission to open new accounts with any other chartered bank. Being “cancelled” by social media companies is bad, but being “de-banked” in a modern economy is worse than being declared a “non-person” by a totalitarian regime:
“The bank of England. London.”by Demetrio Neri_1959 is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0
In the past month, we have heard that various rich and well-connected people have had their bank accounts closed, seemingly because of their dissident political opinions. The same has happened to other people who are much poorer and without connections. Twenty years ago, the same happened to the British National Party. There is a simple libertarian response to this.
No one has the right to coerced association with anyone else. If someone comes to me and asks me to provide him with services, I have an absolute right to say yes or no. If I am uncharitable enough to dislike the colour of his face or what he does in bed, so much the worse. I may lose valuable business. But it is my time, and it is my choice. If anyone starts a whine about the horrors of discrimination, he should be ignored. We have an absolute right to discriminate against others for any reason whatever.
This being said, the position becomes less clear when state power of some kind is involved. Banks in this country require a licence from the State to operate. This protects them from open competition. It also gives them access to services and information from the State that are not given to other persons or businesses. If a bank finds itself in serious financial difficulties, it has at least a greater chance than other large businesses of being saved by the State – by a coordination of support by others or by direct financial help. The State has also made it illegal for many transactions to be made in cash. If I try to buy a car with £20,000 in cash, the car dealership is obliged to refuse my business, or to make so many enquiries that accepting my business is too much trouble. In effect, anyone who wants to spend more than a few thousand pounds in cash is obliged by various actual and shadow laws to use a bank account.
So we have privileged corporations and an effective legal obligation for people to do business with them. This entirely changes the libertarian indifference to commercial discrimination. The banks are a privileged oligopoly. The banks compete for custom among a public that is free to choose one bank rather than another, but that is compelled to choose some bank. For this reason, since the relevant laws will not be repealed, it is legitimate to demand another law to offset some of the effects of the others. Banks should be legally obliged to accept the business of any person or group of persons without question. Limitations on what services are provided must be justified on the grounds of previous financial misconduct as reasonably defined. For example, it should be permitted for a bank to refuse an overdraft to someone who is or has recently been bankrupt, or whose spending habits are obviously reckless. Perhaps it should be permitted for a bank to refuse to lend money for purposes it regards as scandalous as well as commercially unviable. Therefore, a representative of the White Persons’ Supremacy Foundation, or the Vladimir Putin Appreciation Society, should be able to walk into any bank and open an account – with no questions asked. If an account is refused, there should be a legal obligation on the bank to provide a full explanation of the refusal. If the refusal is not made on valid commercial grounds, there should be a right of appeal before a tribunal which does not award costs, and this tribunal should have the power to grant punitive damages against any bank found to be discriminating on any grounds but the validly commercial.
The refusal of banking services is only the beginning of a new and sophisticated totalitarianism. What the banks can do can also be done by supermarkets, by Internet service providers, by hotel chains, by airlines and railway companies, and by utility providers. There is indeed a good case for insisting on a law forbidding any organisation that has the privilege of limited liability from any but obviously commercial discrimination.
“… the Western world is failing — culturally and economically — because the government now has a hand in so much of society”
The Armchair General would almost certainly agree with my frequent lament that the more the government tries to do, the less well it does everything:
There is a famous quote by American journalist and satirist H.L. Menken, which has been deployed by many political writers over the years:
The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by an endless series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary.
It is an enduring quote because it has the ring of truth1, and it certainly fits with the Machiavellian aspect of politics. This attitude was, without doubt, deployed by governments across the world during Covid (and, to some extent, still is).
Your jaundiced2 General would like to propose a related, alternative and rather more plausible soundbite that, I believe, more adequately describes the Western world in the twenty-first century:
The whole consequence of practical politics is the keep the ignorant populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be kept in comfort) by an endless series of colossal fuck-ups, labelled as crises, caused entirely by the government.3
Every time that you see the media whipping up a frenzy about a “crisis“, you can be 99% sure that the issue in question has been caused by the state — and that the real solution is to remove the government intervention. And that is never, ever the action actually proposed.
Crises of Government Origin
Your jaundiced General refers to these phenomena as “Crises of Government Origin” (COGO), and will form the back-bone of a series of posts titled with that acronym. Many of the issues are interlinked, and most are absolutely critical if we are ever to confront the economic and social issues facing us today.These include (but are not limited to):
- the energy crisis;
- the Climate Warming / Change / Heating crisis;
- the housing crisis;
- the NHS staffing crisis;
- the police shortage crisis;
- the obesity crisis;
- the education crisis;
- the pandemic crisis;
- the productivity crisis;
- the activist “charity” crisis;
- the drugs crisis (Scottish edition);
- the rape gang crisis;
- the intersectional and gender crisis;
- just about any other “crisis” you can think of.
To be sure, the UK government is not the worst in some of these areas — but, since it is in UK that my comfy leather armchair is situated, it is the rampant stupidity of our own governments that I shall concentrate on. And no, not all of these posts will include reminding people that Grant Schapps is a prick.
I can promise that every one of them will include illustrations demonstrating the mind-gargling incompetence of our governments (of all persuasions) and “Rolls Royce” civil service4.
The law is a blunt instrument, and the government is really inefficient at doing anything at all.
Fundamentally, the Western world is failing — culturally and economically — because the government now has a hand in so much of society. And the UK is in the vanguard of this malaise as Sharon White, at the time Permanent Secretary to the Treasury (and currently fucking things up in typically Rolls Royce civil servant fashion at John Lewis), said (in a rare example of her being right) in 2015 at the Institute for Government:
The UK is “almost the most centralised developed country in the world”.
Indeed it has been observed that, by some measures, the UK is more centralised than Soviet Russia. This is why we are failing.
The Crises Of Government Origin (COGO) series aims to examine some of these failures — large and small. For starters, let’s have a look at Hate Speech laws and why they are so dangerous.
1. The same applies to Menken’s definition of Puritanism: “The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy”.
2. Caused less by poor mood than incipient liver failure. Now pass the port, would you, old chap. No, to the left, you fool!
3. Yes, yes — I realise that it needs honing, but it will do for now. Feel free to submit more elegant versions in the comments.
4. Snork.
Echoes of War: Accounts of Operation Husky and the Allied Landings in Sicily
OTD Military History
Published 9 Jul 2023On July 9/10 Allied forces launched Operation Husky, the invasion of Sicily. This video presents accounts from various Allied military personnel who were there that day.
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July 9, 2023
Imperial Rome
In UnHerd, Freddie Sayers talks to historian and podcaster Tom Holland about his latest book, Pax:
To his army of ardent followers, Tom Holland has a unique ability to bring antiquity alive. An award-winning British historian, biographer and broadcaster, his thrilling accounts offer more than a mere snapshot of life in Ancient Greece and Rome. In Pax — the third in his encyclopaedic trilogy of best-sellers narrating the rise of the Roman Empire — Holland establishes how peace was finally achieved during the Golden Age, with a forensic recreation of key lives within the civilisation, from emperors to slaves.
This week, Holland came to the UnHerd club to talk about Roman sex lives, Christian morality, and the rise and fall of empires. Below is an edited transcript of the conversation.
Freddie Sayers: Let’s kick off with the very first year in your book.
Tom Holland: It opens in AD 68, which is the year that Nero committed suicide: a key moment in Roman history, and a very, very obvious crisis point. Nero is the last living descendant of Augustus, and Augustus is a god. To be descended from Augustus is to have his divine blood in your veins. And there is a feeling among the Roman people that this is what qualifies you to rule as a Caesar, to rule as an emperor. And so the question that then hangs over Rome in the wake of Nero’s death is: what do we do now? We no longer have a descendant of the divine Augustus treading this mortal earth of ours. How is Rome, how is its empire, going to cohere?
FS: It seemed to me, when I was reading Pax, that there was a recurring theme: a movement between what’s considered decadence, and then a reassertion of either a more manly, martial atmosphere, or a return to how things used to be — to the good old days. With each new emperor in this amazing narrative, it often feels like there’s that same kind of mood, which is: things have gotten a bit soft. We’re going to return to proper Rome.
TH: It’s absolutely a dynamic that runs throughout this period. And it reflects a moral anxiety on the part of the Romans that has been characteristic of them, really, from the time that they start conquering massively wealthy cities in the East — the cities in Asia Minor or Syria or, most of all, Egypt. There’s this anxiety that this wealth is feminising them, that it’s making them weak, it’s making them soft — even as it is felt that the spectacular array of seafood, the gold, the splendid marble with which Rome can be beautified, is what Romans should have, because they are the rulers of the world.
That incredible tension is heightened by class anxieties. There’s no snob like a senatorial snob. They want to distinguish themselves from the masses. But at the same time, there’s the anxiety that if they do this in too Greek a way, in too effeminate a way, then are they really Romans? And so the whole way through this period, the issue of how you can enjoy your wealth, if you are a wealthy Roman, without seeming “unRoman”, is an endearing tension. And of course, there is no figure in the empire who has to wrestle with that tension more significantly than Caesar himself.
FS: The 100-odd years that you’re covering in this volume is a period of great peace and prosperity and power, and yet at each juncture, it feels like there’s this anxiety. That’s what surprised me as a reader. There’s this sense of the precariousness of the empire — maybe it’s become softer, maybe it’s decadent, or maybe it needs to rediscover how it used to be.
TH: And, you see, this is the significance of AD 69, “the Year of the Four Emperors”, because the question is, are the cycles of civil war expressive of faults? Of a kind of dry rot in the fabric of the Empire that is terminal? Of the anger of the gods? And whether, therefore, the Romans need to find a way to appease the gods so that the whole Empire doesn’t collapse. This is an anxiety that lingers for several decades. It looks to us like this is the heyday of the Empire. They’re building the Colosseum, they’re building great temples everywhere. But they’re worrying: “Have the gods turned against us?”
And of course, there is a very famous incident, 10 years after the Year of the Four Emperors, which is the explosion of Vesuvius. And this is definitely seen as another warning from the gods, because it coincides with a terrible plague in Rome, and it coincides with the incineration (for the second time in a decade) of the most significant temple in Rome — the great temple to Jupiter on the Capitol, the most sacred of the seven hills of Rome.
Romans offer sacrifice to the gods or you pay dues to the gods rather in the way that we take out an insurance policy. And if the gods are busy burying famous towns on the Bay of Naples beneath pyroclastic flows, or sending plagues, or burning down temples, then this, to most, is evidence that the Roman people have not been paying their dues. So a lot of what is going on — certainly in the imperial centre — in this period, is an attempt to try and get the Roman Empire back on a stable moral footing.
The Destruction of Army Group Center – Week 254 – July 8, 1944
World War Two
Published 8 Jul 2023Operation Bagration continues, smashing the armies of German Army Group Center and taking ever more territory including the prize of Minsk; on Saipan the Americans have taken most of the island when the Japanese resort to a huge suicidal banzai charge to try and turn the tide; and in Normandy new attacks begin try to finally take Caen and St. Lo.
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July 8, 2023
The Perfect D-Day That History Forgot
Real Time History
Published 7 Jul 2023The summer of 1944 saw the Allies land in France not once but twice. Two months after Operation Overlord, the Allies also landed in Southern France during Operation Dragoon. It was “the perfect landing” and opened up the important ports of Marseille and Toulon for Allied logistics.
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During the pandemic, governments across the world chose the worst way to respond
In City Journal, John Tierney explains why western governments’ almost universal grabbing of extraordinary powers was the worst possible way to handle the public health crisis of the Wuhan Coronavirus:
Long before Covid struck, economists detected a deadly pattern in the impact of natural disasters: if the executive branch of government used the emergency to claim sweeping new powers over the citizenry, more people died than would have if government powers had remained constrained. It’s now clear that the Covid pandemic is the deadliest confirmation yet of that pattern.
Governments around the world seized unprecedented powers during the pandemic. The result was an unprecedented disaster, as recently demonstrated by two exhaustive analyses of the lockdowns’ impact in the United States and Europe. Both reports conclude that the lockdowns made little or no difference in the Covid death toll. But the lockdowns did lead to deaths from other causes during the pandemic, particularly among young and middle-aged people, and those fatalities will continue to mount in the future.
“Most likely lockdowns represent the biggest policy mistake in modern times,” says Lars Jonung of Lund University in Sweden, a coauthor of one of the new reports. He and two fellow economists, Steve Hanke from Johns Hopkins University and Jonas Herby of the Center for Political Studies in Copenhagen, sifted through nearly 20,000 studies for their book, Did Lockdowns Work?, published in June by the Institute for Economic Affairs (IEA) in London. After combining results from the most rigorous studies analyzing fatality rates and the stringency of lockdowns in various states and nations, they estimate that the average lockdown in the United States and Europe during the spring of 2020 reduced Covid mortality by just 3.2 percent. That translates to some 4,000 avoided deaths in the United States — a negligible result compared with the toll from the ordinary flu, which annually kills nearly 40,000 Americans.
Even that small effect may be an overestimate, to judge from the other report, published in February by the Paragon Health Institute. The authors, all former economic advisers to the White House, are Joel Zinberg and Brian Blaise of the institute, Eric Sun of Stanford, and Casey Mulligan of the University of Chicago. They analyzed the rates of Covid mortality and of overall excess mortality (the number of deaths above normal from all causes) in the 50 states and the District of Columbia. They adjusted for the relative vulnerability of each state’s population by factoring in the age distribution (older people were more vulnerable) and the prevalence of obesity and diabetes (which increased the risk from Covid). Then they compared the mortality rates over the first two years of the pandemic with the stringency of each state’s policies (as measured on a widely used Oxford University index that tracked business and school closures, stay-at-home requirements, mandates for masks and vaccines, and other restrictions).
The researchers found no statistically significant effect from the restrictions. The mortality rates in states with stringent policies were not significantly different from those in less restrictive states. Two of the largest states, California and Florida, fared the same — their mortality rates both stood at the national average — despite California’s lengthy lockdowns and Florida’s early reopening. New York, with a mortality rate worse than average despite ranking first in the nation in the stringency of its policies, fared the same as the least restrictive state, South Dakota.
QotD: The amputation of the soul
It was absolutely necessary that the soul should be cut away. Religious belief, in the form in which we had known it, had to be abandoned. By the nineteenth century it was already in essence a lie, a semi-conscious device for keeping the rich rich and the poor poor. The poor were to be contented with their poverty, because it would all be made up to them in the world beyound the grave, usually pictured as something mid-way between Kew Gardens and a jeweller’s shop. Ten thousand a year for me, two pounds a week for you, but we are all the children of God. And through the whole fabric of capitalist society there ran a similar lie, which it was absolutely necessary to rip out.
Consequently there was a long period during which nearly every thinking man was in some sense a rebel, and usually a quite irresponsible rebel. Literature was largely the literature of revolt or of disintegration. Gibbon, Voltaire, Rousseau, Shelley, Byron, Dickens, Stendhal, Samuel Butler, Ibsen, Zola, Flaubert, Shaw, Joyce — in one way or another they are all of them destroyers, wreckers, saboteurs. For two hundred years we had sawed and sawed and sawed at the branch we were sitting on. And in the end, much more suddenly than anyone had foreseen, our efforts were rewarded, and down we came. But unfortunately there had been a little mistake. The thing at the bottom was not a bed of roses after all, it was a cesspool full of barbed wire.
It is as though in the space of ten years we had slid back into the Stone Age. Human types supposedly extinct for centuries, the dancing dervish, the robber chieftain, the Grand Inquisitor, have suddenly reappeared, not as inmates of lunatic asylums, but as the masters of the world. Mechanization and a collective economy seemingly aren’t enough. By themselves they lead merely to the nightmare we are now enduring: endless war and endless underfeeding for the sake of war, slave populations toiling behind barbed wire, women dragged shrieking to the block, cork-lined cellars where the executioner blows your brains out from behind. So it appears that amputation of the soul isn’t just a simple surgical job, like having your appendix out. The wound has a tendency to go septic.
The gist of Mr Muggeridge’s book is contained in two texts from Ecclesiastes: “Vanity of vanities, saith the preacher; all is vanity” and “Fear God, and keep His comandments: for this is the whole duty of man”. It is a viewpoint that has gained a lot of ground lately, among people who would have laughed at it only a few years ago. We are living in a nightmare precisely because we have tried to set up an earthly paradise. We have believed in “progress”. Trusted to human leadership, rendered unto Caesar the things that are God’s — that approximately is the line of thought.
Unfortunately Mr Muggeridge shows no sign of believing in God himself. Or at least he seems to take it for granted that this belief is vanishing from the human mind. There is not much doubt that he is right there, and if one assumes that no sanction can ever be effective except the supernatural one, it is clear what follows. There is no wisdom except in the fear of God; but nobody fears God; there fore there is no wisdom. Man’s history reduces itself to the rise and fall of material civilizations, one Tower of Babal after another. In that case we can be pretty certain what is ahead of us. Wars and yet more wars, revolutions and counter-revolutions, Hitlers and super-Hitlers — and so downwards into abysses which are horrible to contemplate, though I rather suspect Mr Muggeridge of enjoying the prospect.
George Orwell, “Notes on the Way”, Time and Tide, 1940-03-30.
July 7, 2023
Nazis destroy last Jewish sanctuary – War Against Humanity 102
World War Two
Published 6 Jul 2023Until now Miklos Horthy’s Kingdom of Hungary has been a rare sanctuary where most Jews have lived in relative safety. That changes with the German occupation. Now Adolf Eichmann. the Nazis, and their Hungarian allies bring the Holocaust to Hungary.
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