Quotulatiousness

January 21, 2023

When the SS Go Too Far – War Against Humanity 096

World War Two
Published 20 Jan 2023

The internal conflict between Poland and the other United Nations Allies deepens as Churchill faces them with diplomatic defeat over Soviet land grab. In the Occupied Netherlands and Poland the Nazis continue their atrocities.
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QotD: Farmers’ markets are a scam

The first thing I saw was a number of individuals taking photographs of purple carrots and multi-coloured tomatoes to doubtless upload them to Instagram. Customers were shoved out of the way so they could achieve the perfect shot. I can imagine the description that would be added to the images: “At my local market. Buying all organic produce to juice and buying a load of Guatemalan coffee beans to support local farmers. #FoodIsMood”

Carefully navigating the Bugaboos, words leapt out at me from the stalls: “gluten free”, “vegan”, “no added sugar”, “no saturated fats”. It was more like advice from a doctor than things to eat. At the cheese stall I admit I was tempted by the chilli jam accompaniment, as it was described as “rich, tangy tomato with purple shallots and plump sultanas”, but all I needed to do was look at the price — a startling £10 for the small jar with a handwritten label — to decide that the Branston pickle sitting in my store cupboard would do just fine.

An older woman standing by the cheese stall looks as if she is about to pass out. It’s not the heat; rather she has just been informed by the vendor, a young woman with green hair and several face piercings, the price for a piece of Brie and a couple of small goat cheeses. And to add insult to injury, when the customer hands over the £20 to pay she is told, “We only take cards.”

So much for a local, friendly community space. The truth is, these markets are a rip-off, aimed at posturing fools with more money than sense, and food snobs that believe if food isn’t prohibitively expensive for the masses, it’s not good enough to take home and store in their gigantic Smeg fridge.

Julie Bindel, “Mugged by a mud-caked spud”, The Critic, 2022-10-15.

January 20, 2023

“… any association with Davos should put an individual or organization under notice of suspicion”

CDR Salamander wants to sign up — like so many of us — for a post-Davos world:

The whole World Economic Forum/Davos experience is one part Bond villain parody, one part clout seeking billionaires, one part megalomania, a heaping cup of greed, and a dash of rent seeking.

In 2023 things have reached the point where any association with Davos should put an individual or organization under notice of suspicion. Amazing to see people who claim to be American conservatives or lovers of liberty attending in an non-ironic, non-protesting capacity.

This wannabee gaggle of quasi-oligarchs and autocrat throne sniffers represents everything that is wrong with the human desire for control, power, and to crush the individual for fun and profit.

They pretend to be the world government in waiting that no one asked for, no one wants, and trust me on this — no one wants to live under. Being unaccountable to the people is their ideal state.

If you don’t know what I am referring to above, shame on you. Google it yourself, but I couldn’t help but giggle when I read the title from this article by Gideon Rachman at The Financial Times; Geopolitics threatens to destroy the world Davos made.

Really? It is? Then by all means let’s have MOAR!

    …the 2023 WEF — the first to take place in its regular winter location since the pandemic began — could be seen as signalling a return to normalcy. However, China’s sudden abandonment of its zero-Covid policy has raised fears that a new wave of variants could emerge.

    And, even if a fresh pandemic phase is avoided, Covid has left its mark on the way governments and businesses think about globalisation. The assumption that goods and commodities can always be shipped easily around the world has been shattered.

Except for the mentally fragile few and those who leverage power through them, the world is over COVID like it is over the flu. The last three years has been a clarifying event bringing in to stark relief those autocracy worshipers and hypocrites who hold individual rights in contempt. It also helped us see the existential danger a free people can face when they put themselves at the mercy of governments who see a crisis opening a door for an easy grasp at additional powers they will never want to give back.

The past the Davos set desired failed the future that is our present, but that doesn’t give pause to any of them. The Davos view of the future where everyone (except for those at the top) lives in a pod, eats bugs, owns nothing but is “happy” is at best dystopian, at worst justifies at some point if they are not stopped, open global revolt against the ruling class with all the violence and blood that comes with it.

[…]

Simply unacceptable in democratic nations that the will of the people might promote change in political leadership. Next thing you know, they might want even more free speech and redress of grievances.

    Those world leaders who are present might do well to take the funicular up to the Schatzalp Hotel, which served as Mann’s model for the sanatorium in The Magic Mountain. The hotel’s view is the best in Davos — it may offer a chance for quiet reflection on how to prevent war and natural disaster from once again engulfing the global economy

Unspoofable.

Perhaps they should reflect on how they encouraged Russian aggression and European vulnerability to hydrocarbon blackmail? Should they take a moment to see how they look the other way as the PRC engages in wholesale oppression of their Muslim minority? Are they proud of their dividends derived from almost unimaginable levels of air and water pollution flowing out of PRC’s slave labor run factories?

Unlikely — they might miss out on the next party.

A post-Davos world?

How do we bring it here faster?

QotD: Michael Ignatieff

… the Wilson government wasn’t an aberration, for political history is littered with examples of people being found out, often in the most embarrassing possible circumstances. Now that he’s remembered as a byword for complacent failure, it’s easy to forget that David Cameron was a straight-A student who won an exhibition to Brasenose College, Oxford and was described by his tutor, Professor Vernon Bogdanor, as “one of the ablest” students he’d ever taught. (By now you should have spotted a theme.) An even more glaring example, however, comes from across the Atlantic.

Google “Michael Ignatieff” and you wonder if it was really legal for one man to have enjoyed so many blessings. Everything the Canadian intellectual touched turned to gold. At boarding school in Toronto in the Sixties he was captain of the soccer team and editor of the yearbook. He taught at Oxford and the London School of Economics. He presented The Late Show for the BBC and wrote columns for the Observer. His documentaries won awards; his biography of Isaiah Berlin was shortlisted for some of the world’s most prestigious non-fiction prizes; his novel was even shortlisted for the Booker Prize. He was awarded a professorial chair at Harvard, then another at Toronto. And when his friends in the Canadian Liberal Party invited him to make a bid for the leadership, further glory seemed inevitable.

What happened next, however, makes Kwarteng’s stewardship of the Treasury look like a triumph. In 2011 Ignatieff led the Liberals to the worst defeat in their history, finishing third with just 34 seats. What was worse, he even lost his own seat in Etobicoke–Lakeshore, the first Canadian opposition leader to do so since 1900. His staff were in tears, the world was watching, and all those book prizes must have seemed an awfully long way away. In the cruellest twist imaginable, the man who always came top in exams had failed the most public exam of all.

Dominic Sandbrook, “Kwasi Kwarteng was the wrong sort of clever”, UnHerd, 2022-10-17.

January 19, 2023

“Sir, was everyone in history a racist?”

Filed under: Books, Britain, Education, History — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

At The Critic, Fred Skulthorp explains how British history is being taught in schools these days:

Sir John Hawkins (1532-1595), Sir Francis Drake (1540?-1596), and Thomas Cavendish (1560-1592).
Probably a copy of Daniel Myten’s’ painting of the same subject, now part of the Royal Museums Greenwich collection via Wikimedia Commons.

“Sir, was everyone in history a racist?” said Daniel one slow Thursday afternoon at my old school in North London. Daniel hadn’t put up his hand, so of course, I had to tell him off. Even worse, being in my usual teacherly bad mood, I wasn’t exactly Mr Chips with my response. What a silly question, I snapped, before going back to trying to teach a set of pandemic weary teenagers about the Reformation.

Daniel deserved a better answer than that. Not least because some version of his question has now worked its way onto the lips of the certain adults who run schools. The latest “yes” in a primary school in Lewisham saw an “overwhelming” majority vote to remove the stain of Sir Francis Drake’s name from the school. Who knows what arguments went into the decision, but one can only hope they delved a little bit more into his career than the BBC who initially served him up as a “16th century slave trader”.

The decision didn’t surprise me. I had briefly taught in another secondary school just down the road, and another in North London, where making the curriculum inclusive, diverse, decolonised, equal etc was all the rage. For me, Drake was a fascinating target. I had actually taught the man to a class of Year 8s. Funnily enough then, Drake was one of the few old white men of British history deemed more accessible — largely given his relationship with an escaped slave called Diego. According to Miranda Kaufman, whose book Black Tudors was gleefully worked into our history curriculum, Diego became Drake’s “right-hand man” in his various endeavours across the high seas.

This wasn’t enough to exonerate him in Lewisham. When it comes to slavery and being a dead white man, even flirt with it and you’re out. Beyond the expected uproar, the bigger issue here is the increasingly strange way we feel compelled to serve up our history to make it accessible for “minorities” in the name of “diversity, equality and inclusivity”.

Both schools I taught in during my short-lived career were some of the most diverse in London. This isn’t something that particularly interested me, but it certainly played on the conscience of some of my colleagues. One of the most cringe-inducing conversations I have ever had was with a fellow teacher, who on discussing changes to the curriculum in the name of “diversity” recalled something along the lines of: that they had looked down the register, seen the names and wondered how we might better tell their story. Presumably, this meant anything other than the usual fare of boring old “white” British history

What exactly is their story? As British citizens, their story is our story; our history, their history and vice versa. The attempts to presume exactly what these teenagers found relatable end up pretty disingenuous. Roman Britain? Ever heard of Ivory Bangle Lady? The Tudors? All old dead white guys, huh? Nope, check out this cool black trumpeter who was in the court of Henry VII! These are interesting curios, but sprinkling them throughout the curriculum all too often seemed to advance the misconception that Britain has always been a multiracial, multicultural society — something not only historically inaccurate but incredibly patronising to the children of second, third, even fourth generation immigrants.

This all came to a head during a unit on World War One, which our head of department insisted be based on the book The World’s War: Forgotten Soldiers of Empire by David Olusoga. The book is an interesting piece of revisionism about the role of colonial soldiers in WW1. In obsessing over race and teaching the Western Front, it does at some point have to contend with the fact that the vast majority who died there were, err … white men. In one particularly painful lesson, I ended up having to teach the Battle of the Somme by asking the class: what does the story of Chinese labourers reveal about World War One? Funnily enough, as it turns out, not that much! I’m sure being subjected to racial slurs whilst doing manual labour behind the front wasn’t much fun. But I felt something fundamentally dishonest, even borderline offensive, in prioritising their story over those of the Pals Battalions who went over the top that morning.

The Partisan War Behind the Frontlines – WW2 Documentary Special

Filed under: Germany, History, Military, Railways, Russia, WW2 — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

World War Two
Published 18 Jan 2023

There is a second war raging on the Eastern Front. From the huge expanses of no man’s land behind the German lines, Moscow’s battle-hardened and well-armed partisan bands are waging a Rail War in support of Red Army offensives. But every successful mission brings down the wrath of the genocidal Axis war machine.
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You must be protected from coworkers who threaten your health … by bringing in cake?

Filed under: Britain, Business, Cancon, Government, Health — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Christopher Snowden knows a slippery slope when the media pushes another nanny state health concern as serious as cake in the workplace:

    If nobody brought in cakes into the office, I would not eat cakes in the day, but because people do bring cakes in, I eat them.

Who is this co-worker from hell? Who is this whining, snivelling infant demanding that the rest of the world forfeits their small pleasures because she has no self-control?

It is none other than the head of the Food Standards Agency, Susan Jebb, who is in The Times tomorrow comparing cakes to passive smoking.

The full quote reads:

    “We all like to think we’re rational, intelligent, educated people who make informed choices the whole time and we undervalue the impact of the environment”, she said. “If nobody brought in cakes into the office, I would not eat cakes in the day, but because people do bring cakes in, I eat them. Now, OK, I have made a choice, but people were making a choice to go into a smoky pub.”

Indeed they were, Susan, before people like you took that choice away to such an extent that even a pub that put up a sign saying “SMOKERS ONLY” on the door and employed no one but smokers would still forbidden from accommodating them.

I’ve made a few slippery slope arguments in my time — contrary to midwit opinion, they are often valid — but even I never imagined that a workplace smoking ban would evolve into a workplace cupcake ban. Talk about the thin end of the wedge!

    While saying the two issues were not identical, Jebb argued that passive smoking inflicted harm on others “and exactly the same is true of food”.

To inflict something on someone implies that it is done without their consent. In that sense — and leaving aside the question of whether wisps of secondhand smoke are actually harmful — passive smoking doesn’t inflict harm on a person who knowingly goes to a smoky pub. The same is obviously true of someone who offers you a cake. If they held you down and physically shoved it down your throat, that would be a different matter, but surely that is already illegal under some law or other?

Meanwhile, Canadian nanny state enablers are trying to do battlespace prep to get the government to mandate new warning labels to containers of alcoholic beverages and to significantly cut the already low maximum “recommended consumption”:

… a report on the new drinking guidance released Tuesday by the Canadian Centre on Substance Use and Addiction says the warning labels could inform consumers about serious health risks including cancer, the number of standard drinks in a container and the benefits of limiting consumption to two drinks a week.

“Consuming more than two standard drinks per drinking occasion is associated with an increased risk of harms to self and others, including injuries and violence,” the report says.

The guidance is based on the findings of a panel of 23 experts who reviewed nearly 6,000 peer-reviewed studies as part of a two-year process that also considered feedback from 4,845 people during an online public consultation process in spring 2021.

The most recent available data show that alcohol causes nearly 7,000 cancer deaths each year in Canada, with most cases being breast or colon cancer, followed by cancers of the rectum, mouth and throat, liver, esophagus and larynx. Liver disease and most types of cardiovascular diseases are also linked to alcohol use.

The guidance updates Canada’s Low-Risk Drinking Guidelines set in 2011, when two drinks a day were considered low risk and it was believed that women could safely consume up to 10 drinks a week and men could have 15 drinks.

Tanks Chats #164 | M-50 Sherman | The Tank Museum

Filed under: France, History, Middle East, Military, USA, Weapons — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

The Tank Museum
Published 23 Sep 2022

In this episode of Tank Chats, David Willey discusses the history of the M-50 version of the Sherman.
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QotD: Did Sparta achieve its strategic objectives?

Filed under: Europe, Greece, History, Quotations — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

The final objective we can be quite certain about is that Sparta aimed to protect the internal social and political order of Sparta, which essentially amounts to a strategic objective to be able to continue mistreating the helots and the perioikoi. In practice – given Sparta’s desperate shortness of manpower (and economic resources!) and continued unwillingness to revisit the nature of its oppressive class system, we may say with some confidence that Sparta effectively sacrificed all other objectives on the altar of this one.

And yet Sparta’s failure here was perhaps the most complete of all. The collapse of the Spartiate class did not abate after Leuktra; by the 230s, there were hardly any Spartiates left. Meanwhile, the transition of Messenia from a group of subject communities supporting Sparta economically to an active and hostile power on Sparta’s border essentially represented the end of the Spartan social order as established in the seventh century with the reduction of Messenia to helotry in the first place.

So, does Sparta achieve its strategic objectives? By and large, I think the answer here has to be “no”. Sparta – the supposed enemy of tyrants – by mismanaging its own leadership invited one foreign oppressor (Macedon) into Greece after another (Persia). As a state that seems – to me at least – to have considered itself the natural and rightful leader of all of the Greek states, Sparta, routinely and comprehensively proved itself unworthy of the position.

The one thing we may say for Spartan foreign and military policy is that it seems to have made the world safe for helotry – it preserved the brutal system of oppression which was foundational to the Spartan state. But consider just how weak an achievement that is – we might, after all, make the same claim about North Korea: it has managed only to successfully preserve its own internal systems of oppression.

Bret Devereaux, “Collections: This. Isn’t. Sparta. Part VII: Spartan Ends”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2019-09-27.

January 18, 2023

The Roman Army, With Adrian Goldsworthy

Filed under: Europe, History, Military — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Well That Aged Well
Published 12 May 2021

In this episode we take a look at the Roman Army, and its comanders. What made the Roman Army so efficent? Was it the practice? The motivation? Their courrage? Or was it more to it? Find out in this week’s episode of “Well That Aged Well”, With Erlend Hedegart.
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L’affaire Dreyfus

Filed under: France, Germany, History, Military — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Robert Zaretsky on an espionage scandal that convulsed the French Third Republic and still has resonance down to today:

Front page of L’Aurore for 13 January, 1898 with Zola’s J’Accuse headline.
Wikimedia Commons.

On January 13, 1898, Parisians awoke to the chorus of hundreds of news criers who, striding along the grand boulevards and brandishing copies of the newspaper L’Aurore, were shouting passages from the article that sprawled across the front page. It had originally been titled by its author, the novelist Émile Zola, “A Letter to M. Félix Faure, President of the Republique”. But with a flair for the sensational, the newspaper’s editor, Georges Clemenceau, slapped on a punchier headline. Stepping out of a department store or stepping down from a carriage, sitting at a café or standing at an intersection, pedestrians were greeted by two words that continue to resonate 125 years to the day after their first publication: “J’Accuse!

With this exclamation, Zola’s letter transformed une affaire judiciare into l’affaire Dreyfus or, more simply, the Dreyfus Affair. It catapulted the French novelist onto the world stage at a critical moment in the history of his country, which was reeling from the forces of globalisation and industrialisation and riven by opposing understandings of its revolutionary heritage. It is thus hardly surprising that Zola’s fame rests more heavily on the letter than on his sweeping 20-volume masterpiece of literary realism, the Rougon-Macquart. It took a novelist to heave the facts of this affair into a narrative which, more than a century later, thrums with equal urgency. Moreover, as with the novels of the Rougon-Macquart, the letter thrusts onto centre-stage a lone individual swept up, and all too often swept under, the political and social, irrational and ideological forces of the modern age.

It all began with the contents of a rubbish bin. In September 1894, a cleaning woman at the German Embassy, in the pay of France’s military intelligence service, delivered her nightly harvest to her employers. Buried in the mound of discarded papers was a memorandum, known as the bordereau or note, revealing top secret advances in French artillery technology and tactics. In a frantic scramble to find its author, the war ministry’s suspicion settled on Captain Alfred Dreyfus, an officer in the High Command who stood out for his standoffishness and Jewishness.

Upon being arrested and charged, a bewildered Dreyfus denied the charges, pointing out several things mentioned in the bordereau he could not possibly have known. The seven members of the military tribunal, ignoring these inconsistencies as well as the insistence of their own graphologist that Dreyfus’s handwriting did not match the bordereau‘s, unanimously found him guilty. He was sentenced to life imprisonment in solitary confinement on Devil’s Island, a malarial rock off the coast of French Guyana.

But first came a remarkable ritual of public humiliation. Dreyfus was marched into the courtyard of the École militaire, the renowned military academy a short distance from the recently erected Eiffel Tower. In the shadow of that monument to modernity, an officer preceded to snap Dreyfus’s sword — broken and soldered back together with tin the night before, to make the gesture seem effortless — and tear off his insignia — whose threads were already loosened — while a dense crowd howled with calls for the death of the “Jewish traitor!”

Two years later, as Dreyfus wasted away in solitary confinement, Colonel Georges Picquart, the newly appointed head of military intelligence, found that another missive about French military plans had ended up in the rubbish bin at the German Embassy. Moreover, the handwriting on this new document, which matched that of the bordereau, also matched the hand of Ferdinand Esterhazy, an officer notorious for his womanising and gambling.

Picquart disliked Jews as much as his many of his fellow officers did. But when his commanding officer asked him why it mattered if “this Jew remains on Devil’s Island”, Picquart replied: “Because he is innocent!” The answer earned Picquart a rapid transfer to a desert outpost in North Africa. Before he was packed off, though, Picquart vowed that he would not “carry this secret to my grave”. He then shared what he knew with Auguste Scheurer-Kestner, the leader of Dreyfusards, a small but growing coterie of politicians and writers seeking a retrial for Dreyfus.

In late 1897, Zola met with Scheurer-Kestner, who told him about Picquart’s discovery. As the mesmerised novelist listened, he glimpsed the theatrical as well as moral dimensions of the affair. “It’s thrilling!” he gasped. “It’s frightful! But it is also drama on the grand scale!” It took Zola to scale it to greatness by flipping Oscar Wilde’s sly quip that anyone could make history, but only a great man could write it. Instead, Zola showed, a man becomes truly great only by, in every sense of the word, making history.

Ask Ian: Why No German WW2 50-Cal Machine Guns? (feat. Nick Moran)

Forgotten Weapons
Published 20 Sep 2022

From Nathaniel on Patreon:
“Why didn’t Germany or Axis powers have a machine gun similar to the American M2?”

Basically, because everyone faced the choice of a .50 caliber machine gun or 20mm (or larger) cannons for anti-aircraft use, and most people chose the cannons — including Germany. There were some .50 caliber machine guns adopted by Axis powers, most notably the Hotchkiss 1930, a magazine-fed 13.2mm gun that was used by both Italy and Japan (among others). However, the use of the .50 caliber M2 by the US was really a logistical holdover form the interwar period. The M2 remained in production because it was adopted by US Coastal Artillery as a water-cooled anti-aircraft gun, and commercial sales by Colt were slim but sufficient to keep the gun in development through the 20s and 30s. It was used as a main armament in early American armor, but obsolete in this role when the war broke out.

However, with the gun in production and no obvious domestic 20mm design, the US chose to simply make an astounding number of M2s and just dump them everywhere, from Jeeps to trucks to halftracks to tanks to self-propelled guns. And that’s not considering the 75% of production that went to coaxial and aircraft versions …

Anyway, back to the question. The German choice for antiaircraft use was the 20mm and 37mm Flak systems, and not a .50 MG on every tank turret. And so, there was really no motive to develop such a gun. The Soviets did choose to go the US route, though, and developed the DShK-38 for the same role as the US M2 — although it was made in only a tiny fraction of the quantity of the M2.
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QotD: Tanks for Ukraine?

Filed under: Britain, Europe, France, Humour, Military, Quotations — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Lately we’ve been tap dancing up to even heavier gear [for Ukraine]. The US has announced we’ll be sending some M2 Bradley IFVs, and France chipped in some AMX-10 RC heavy armored cars. While referred to as a char, or tank, in French service and apparently some obscure EU regulation classifies anything above a certain weight and with a big enough gun as a tank … and the AMX-10 clears those hurdles … war nerds will insist that unless it comes from the tank region of France it’s just a sparkling armored fighting vehicle.

It looks like the inhibition on sending tanks is finally cracking, though. While Germany is still dithering over letting Poland send some of its Leopard 2’s, Britain has announced it’s sending 14 Challenger 2 main battle tanks.

I found that particular number interesting. Late Cold War and post-Cold War Russian armored units use three-tank platoons and three platoons plus a commander’s tank make a ten tank company.

The British Army, from whose stores the Challengers will be pulled, uses some archaic TO&E, possibly left over from the Wars of the Roses or Cromwell’s New Model Army, wherein four tanks equal a Bonnet*, and four Bonnets plus two more tanks in a headquarters Bonnet equal an eighteen-tank Spanner†.

Fourteen tanks, however, is enough for three four-tank platoons plus two tanks for an HQ platoon, equalling a fourteen tank US-style armored company. Apparently the Ukies are using a US/(most of)NATO TO&E for their armored units. So the Ukrainians will have at least one company of Western MBTs.

    * Bonnet = Troop
    † Spanner = Squadron

Tamara Keel, “Clank Clank Goes the Tank”, View From The Porch, 2023-01-15.

January 17, 2023

“Karl Marx was one hollow and rotten tree, inside and out, from beginning to end”

Filed under: Books, Britain, Economics, History — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

To mark the passing of Paul Johnson, the Foundation for Economic Education reposted an appreciation of Johnson’s Intellectuals by Lawrence W. Reed praising his essay on Karl Marx:

None of Johnson’s subjects can match Karl Marx for sheer loathsomeness and shameless fakery. He was a virulent racist and anti-Semite with a vicious temper (“Jewish n****r” was one of his favorite epithets). On a good day, he enjoyed threatening those who disagreed with him by blurting, “I will annihilate you!” His personal hygiene was, well, suffice it to say he had none. He was heartlessly cruel to his family and anyone who crossed him. This is the same man who postured as a thinker whose ideas would save humanity.

We learn in Intellectuals that the chef who cooked up communism professed to be “scientific”. In reality, Johnson argues, “there was nothing scientific about him; indeed, in all that matters he was anti-scientific”. His most famous lines — including “religion is the opiate of the masses” and workers “have nothing to lose but their chains” — were flagrantly ripped off from other authors. He “never set foot in a mill, factory, mine or other industrial workplace in the whole of his life”, steadfastly abjured invitations to do so, and denounced fellow revolutionaries who did. He never let a fact or a glimmer of reality stem the flow of poison from his pen. He had no money because he refused to work for it, then cursed those who had it and didn’t share it with him. His own mother said she wished her son “would accumulate some capital instead of just writing about it”.

And that’s for starters. Read Johnson’s chapter on Marx, and you’ll begin to understand the connection between the evil within the man and the evil his gibberish wrought. The Black Book of Communism estimates the death toll from attempts to put the rantings of this detestable lunatic into practice at minimally 100 million.

“What emerges from a reading of Capital is Marx’s fundamental failure to understand capitalism”, writes Johnson.

    He failed precisely because he was unscientific: he would not investigate the facts himself, or use objectively the facts investigated by others. From start to finish, not just Capital but all his work reflects a disregard for truth which at times amounts to contempt. That is the primary reason why Marxism, as a system, cannot produce the results claimed for it; and to call it “scientific” is preposterous.

Many people who don’t know better, and an awful lot of those in “intellectual” circles who should, still think Karl Marx was some sort of prescient genius motivated by compassion for workers. Some even disgrace themselves with T-shirts bearing his unkempt image. They really ought to thank Paul Johnson for doing the thinking they themselves never made time for.

Actually, we were warned about people like Marx 2,000 years before Johnson. Matthew 7:16 wisely counsels:

    Beware of false prophets. They come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly they are ravenous wolves. By their fruit you will know them. Are grapes gathered from thornbushes, or figs from thistles? Likewise, every good tree bears good fruit, but a bad tree bears bad fruit.

Karl Marx was one hollow and rotten tree, inside and out, from beginning to end.

The Early Emperors, Part 11 – The Flavian Reconstruction

Filed under: Europe, History, Middle East — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

seangabb
Published 29 Dec 2022

This is a video record of a lecture given by Sean Gabb, in which he discusses the three Flavian Emperors who ruled between 69 and 98 AD — Vespasian, Titus, and Domitian. He also discusses the Jewish Revolt and the eruption of Vesuvius.

The Roman Empire was the last and the greatest of the ancient empires. It is the origin from which springs the history of Western Europe and those nations that descend from Western Europe.
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