Paul Sellers
Published 25 Apr 2022You are going to want a hot cup of tea or coffee with this one. It is something a little different. Paul has been working to build for his home, Sellers Home, all the hand-made furnishings that can practically be made from wood. This is the story of Paul, the story of woodworking and the story of Sellers Home.
We sometimes do something short and snappy for viewers but this is for those of you who want a deeper dive. Enjoy!
The full detailed projects are available with premium membership over on woodworkingmasterclasses.com (we will be switching to sellershome.com soon).
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August 22, 2022
Sellers Home | Paul Sellers
QotD: The inevitability of World War 1
If they bother to teach it at all these days, World War I is still presented as a big mystery. You get some stuff about the Triple Entente, some other stuff about the assassination of the Archduke, maybe something about the Zimmerman Telegram. Why any of that should’ve led to the most horrific war in human history up to that point is left unexplained. Also left unexplored is how nobody seemed to see it coming. World War I just kinda … happened, kids are taught.
You can blame the usual suspects for a lot of this — the Kaiser et al are far too White and male to be worth spending time on, especially when you’ve got to devote so many weeks to Harriet Tubman and Rosa Parks. But the other reason — the far more important one for our purposes — is this: It’s a mystery to the teachers, too.
As academics who have never set foot in the real world, they take other academics’ words at face value. And the academics of 1913 couldn’t figure it out either. They pointed out that a general European war would cause the world’s financial system to collapse; ergo there would be no war. Besides, they argued, even if Germany did go to war, she lacked the natural resources to sustain the fight. And finally, they claimed, the firepower of modern infantry is just too overwhelming — given their rates of fire, two regiments equipped with machine guns would wipe each other out in less than two minutes.
Credit where it’s due: The eggheads were right about all of that. The global financial system did collapse; Germany as constituted at the outbreak of war didn’t have the resources to keep fighting; and the initial skirmishes showed the overwhelming impact of massed firepower. But the eggheads never learned that people are people, and since people love fighting more than anything else in the world, solutions were quickly found.
The United States, with its shiny new Federal Reserve system (created late 1913), was more than happy to step into the financial breach, just as American companies were more than happy to help Germany (and everyone else) with their armaments shortage. And Walther Rathenau happened, as my students would write, keeping the raw materials flowing to German industry. And faced with the overwhelming firepower of machine guns, soldiers ducked. Then they dug, and there’s your four years of bloody trench warfare.
Even the outbreak of the war, far from being a mystery, is painfully obvious if you know the first thing about the major players. In what historians call the Long 19th Century (1789-1914), it was taken for granted that a nation needed colonies to be a serious power. The reasoning behind this was never too sound, and by the turn of the 20th century various smart guys had figured out that on balance colonies were more trouble than they were worth, but pretty much by definition smart guys don’t hold on to the reins of power. Bismarck didn’t — the Berlin Conference was supposed to keep jingo knuckleheads like Wilhelm II from starting a war over a few acres of scrub jungle, but since Wilhelm II shared his class’s raging hardon for colonial expansion, all it ended up doing was sweeping Bismarck out of office. And as for Tsar Nicholas and his colonial adventures in the Balkans (and the Far East), one could write an entire book about that stupidity and still not cover all of it. Throw in England’s stuffed shirt of a king, and France’s legendary inability to maintain a stable government, and tragedy was inevitable.
In short, World War 1 was a massive, indescribably bloody dick-measuring contest between a few inbred yokels. To anyone who has met the Sons of Privilege*, or who is passingly familiar with the Peter Principle, this comes as no surprise. Hell, Lenin saw it, and a guy with his egg head further up his own ass you’ll never find.** All you have to do is look at the people, not the paper.
* they’re like the Sons of Anarchy, but effete and usually gay.
** though he basically just stole the idea from Hobson, who, though a goofy love-the-worlder, was actually a pretty smart guy.Severian, “1913”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2019-08-20.
August 21, 2022
The pandemic lockdowns heralded the “worldwide end of the Nuremburg code”
At Samizdata, Perry de Havilland considers how British culture has been impacted by many of the worst notions coming out of American culture in the last few years:
… support for Brexit, by no means confined to the lumpenproletariat of Guardian reader’s imagination, might not indicate what purveyors of the high status opinion fondly imagine. The conflation of Brexit with the “Trump phenomenon” was always overblown, given the deep social and structural differences between UK and USA. Yes, we are influenced by America, but we are not the same in oh so many ways.
But western civilisation, not just Britain, is undeniably going through a very strange phase. The insane and demonstrably pointless covid lockdowns seem to have had a pressure cooker effect, with every -ism being dialled up several notches. The mainstreaming of transsexuality, a largely harmless hobby until a lunatic fringe grabbed hold of it, indicates the world is not running in well-oiled grooves. An inability to define “what is a woman?”, by sages and politicians who nevertheless expect to be treated as serious people, would have seemed implausible just a few years ago.
But the covid lockdowns, that is the “biggie”: an egregious abridgement of liberty & common sense that placed the global economy into repeated bouts of cardiac arrest. The worldwide end of the Nuremburg code.
The lockdowns were an even more polarising issue that Brexit or Trump or indeed anything else. Why? Because there was no opt-out, you could not just go to work, or visit granny, no ability to ignore the whole thing and just head down the pub or retire for a macha latte in some café. The effects of that will be enduring. That was the issue that taught a lot of people to fear what other people believe to be true, and people always hate what they fear.
Now just wait to see what happens when the green lunacy that stopped investment in reliable power supply and new reservoirs means we start running out of power and water. I suspect that will be what makes the cork finally blow off.
Sicily Liberated; Italy in the Firing Line – WW2 – 208 – August 20, 1943
World War Two
Published 20 Aug 2022The British and Americans race for Messina to complete the conquest of Sicily — who will reach it first? On New Guinea, the Allies destroy a substantial Japanese air force; there are several major Allied air raids over Europe, the fighting in the USSR around Kharkov is brutal and costly for both sides, and a secret Allied leadership conference in Quebec begins to determine the course of the war. Busy week.
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History Summarized: The Acropolis
Overly Sarcastic Productions
Published 29 Apr 2022They say of the Acropolis, where the Parthenon is …
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August 20, 2022
How Turkey Fought a WW1 Peace Treaty – The Greek-Turkish War 1919-1923
The Great War
Published 19 Aug 2022The defeat of the Ottoman Empire in 1918 meant that it got its own peace treaty like the other three Central Powers. But the emerging Turkish National Movement under Mustafa Kemal resisted the Treaty of Sevres and occupation by various Entente Powers. Their successful resistance led to the creation of modern Turkey and the Treaty of Lausanne in 1923.
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The historical tourist attractions of Pisa
In the latest Age of Invention newsletter, Anton Howes talks about a recent trip to Italy, specifically the historically interesting places in Pisa and Lucca:

Galileo Galilei circa 1640.
Detail of an oil portrait by Justus Sustermans (1597-1681) from the National Maritime Museum via Wikimedia Commons.
Some are famous. Galileo Galilei, for example, is said to have used the leaning tower of Pisa to drop two spheres of different masses, to show that they would fall at the same speed — at least, that’s what his disciple Vincenzo Viviani claimed, ten years after Galileo’s death, and many decades after the alleged demonstration. Even if Viviani was being accurate, however, Galileo certainly wasn’t the first to demonstrate the concept. And Viviani mistakenly claimed priority for all sort of other scientific breakthroughs for his master, so like most other historians I’m inclined to doubt the story.
Nonetheless, Pisa was certainly Galileo’s birthplace — though it turns out that there are three different locations in the city to have claimed the honour over the years.
Galileo was initially thought to have been born in or near the fortress (its walls are impressive to look at and contain a pleasant garden). But this location was then refuted on the basis that for Galileo’s father Vincenzo Galilei to have lived in the fortress he would have had to have been a master at arms, which he was not. He was in fact a merchant and lute-maker. So in the nineteenth century a new location emerged: the casa Bocca, on the Stretto Borgo, which Vincenzo rented a few months before Galileo’s birth, and where the Galilei family lived for the next decade. It seemed a secure candidate for a while, except for a weird discrepancy: Galileo’s baptismal certificate assigned his birth to the wrong parish.
It then emerged that Galileo’s mother’s family — the Ammannati — lived in the correct parish, and that the custom of the time was for women to return to their parents’ home for the birth of their first child. Thus, the evidence points to Galileo having been born at the Casa Ammanati on the via Giusti. It’s a neat story of how a tourist destination can jump around based on new research, though there’s unfortunately not much to visit there other than a plaque.
In terms of things to actually see, one of the most impressive things in Pisa is the Museo delle Navi Antiche (Museum of Ancient Ships), which we found to be undeservedly deserted. Housed in the old stables for the city’s cavalry, and once the site of the Medici-era naval arsenal, the museum gives a fantastically thorough overview of the city from its Etruscan beginnings through to Roman subjugation, Ostrogothic invasion, Byzantine reconquest, and Longbeard settlement in the sixth century (although they’re usually called the Lombards, this comes from langobardi — literally, longbeards — so I think calling them that is both more accurate and more fun).
The museum’s highlight, however, is the ancient ships for which it is named, and which are incredibly well-preserved. I was stunned to see a massive actual wooden anchor, not just a reconstruction, of a cargo ship from the second century BC. It’s so well-preserved that you can even make out a decoration, carved into the wood, of a ray fish. The same goes for the rest of the various ships’ timbers. You can see almost all of their original hulls and planking, as well as finer details like rudder-oars, benches for the rowers, and in one case even the ship’s name carved into the wood — the Alkedo, which appears to have been a pleasure boat from the first century. Apparently, during excavation, the archaeologists could even make out the Alkedo‘s original red and white paint, as well as the impression left by an iron sheet that had covered its prow. The ships’ contents are often just as astonishing, with well-preserved baskets, fragments of clothing, and even bits of the rigging like its wooden pulleys and ropes. Well worth a visit.
Czech M14: The ZK-420S Battle Rifle
Forgotten Weapons
Published 7 Apr 2017The ZK-420S is an experimental Czech rifle that is virtually unknown today, but which was remarkably influential, bearing significant elements of the Garand and several other Czech designs, and influencing the M14 and Kalashnikov rifles. Originally designed by Josef Koucky in 1942, the plans were hurriedly dusted off and improved at the end of World War 2. With many nations looking at the possibility of adopted self-loading military rifles, Brno hoped to make export sales of the design.
The ZK420S uses the trigger mechanism of the M1 Garand and a gas-operated rotating bolt action very similar to the Garand and AK rifles. It has a simple adjustable 3-position gas system, and a quick and simple disassembly procedure. It uses detachable box magazines (10 round, and not copied from an existing design) and was made in a variety of calibers for testing — including 8×57, 7×57, 7.5 Swiss, 6.5 Swedish, and .30-06. Examples were trialed or examined in the United States, Argentina, Israel, Ethiopia, England, Switzerland, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, and elsewhere — this particular rifle is from the Norwegian trials.
In my opinion, it is an excellent rifle, and its failure to sell was probably due to price and the combination of tight budgets and cheap surplus war material in the late 1940s. It is handy, well balanced, and has a good magazine design and good sights. Recoil is comparable to the Garand. Ultimately the development program in Czechoslovakia would lead to the ZK-472 in 7.5x49mm, which would proceed to the 7.62x45mm in the vz.52 rifle.
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QotD: The improbable survival of the Byzantine empire
The [Eastern Roman] Empire was faced by a triple threat to its existence. There were the northern barbarians. There was militant Islam in the south. There was an internal collapse of population. Each of these had been brought on by changes in the climate that no one at the time could have understood had they been noticed. It would not be until after 800 that the climate would turn benign again. In the meantime, any state to which even a shadow of Lecky’s dismissal applied would have crumpled in six months. Only the most courageous and determined action, only the most radical changes of its structure, could save the Empire. And saved the Empire most definitely was.
The reason for this is that the Mediaeval Roman State was directed by creative pragmatists. Look for one moment beneath its glittering surface, and the Ancient Roman Empire was a ghastly place for most of the people who lived in it. The Emperors at the top were often vicious incompetents. They ruled through an immense and parasitic bureaucracy. They were supreme governors of an army too large to be controlled. They protected a landed aristocracy that was a repository of culture, but that was ruthless in its exaction of rent. Most ordinary people were disarmed tax-slaves, where not chattel slaves or serfs.
The contemporary historians themselves are disappointingly vague about the seventh and eighth centuries. Our only evidence for what happened comes from the description of established facts in the tenth century. As early as the seventh century, though, the Mediaeval Roman State pulled off the miracle of reforming itself internally while fighting a war of survival on every frontier. Much of the bureaucracy was shut down. Taxes were cut. The silver coinage was stabilised. Above all, the senatorial estates were broken up and given to those who worked on them, in return for service in local militias. Though never abolished, chattel slavery became far less pervasive. The civil law was simplified, and the criminal law humanised – after the seventh century, as said, the death penalty was rarely used.
The Mediaeval Roman Empire survived because of a revolutionary transformation in which ordinary people became armed stakeholders. The inhabitants of Roman Gaul and Italy and Spain barely looked up from their ploughs as the Barbarians swirled round them. The citizens of Mediaeval Rome fought like tigers in defence of their country and their Orthodox faith. Time and again, the armies of the Caliph smashed against a wall of armed freeholders. This was a transformation pushed through in a century and a half of recurrent crises during which Constantinople itself was repeatedly under siege. Alone among the ancient empires in its path, Mediaeval Rome faced down the Arabs, and kept Islam at bay for nearly five centuries. Would it be superfluous to say that no one does this by accident?
Sean Gabb, “The Mediaeval Roman Empire: An Unlikely Emergence and Survival”, SeanGabb.co.uk, 2018-09-14.
August 19, 2022
Why Quebec rejected the American Revolution
Conrad Black outlines the journey of the French colony of New France through the British conquest to the (amazing to the Americans) decision to stay under British control rather than join the breakaway American colonies in 1776:
Civil rights were not a burning issue when Canada was primarily the French colony of New France. The purpose of New France was entirely commercial and essentially based upon the fur trade until Jean Talon created industries that made New France self-sufficient. And to raise the population he imported 1,000 nubile young French women, and today approximately seven million French Canadians and Franco-Americans are descended from them. Only at this point, about 75 years after it was founded, did New France develop a rudimentary legal and judicial framework.
Eighty years later, when the British captured Québec City and Montréal in the Seven Years’ War, a gentle form of British military rule ensued. A small English-speaking population arose, chiefly composed of commercial sharpers from the American colonies claiming to be performing a useful service but, in fact, exploiting the French Canadians. Colonel James Murray became the first English civil governor of Québec in 1764. A Royal proclamation had foreseen an assembly to govern Québec, but this was complicated by the fact that at the time British law excluded any Roman Catholic from voting for or being a member of any such assembly, and accordingly the approximately 500 English-speaking merchants in Québec demanded an assembly since they would be the sole members of it. Murray liked the French Canadians and despised the American interlopers as scoundrels. He wrote: “In general they are the most immoral collection of men I ever knew.” He described the French of Québec as: “a frugal, industrious, moral race of men who (greatly appreciate) the mild treatment they have received from the King’s officers”. Instead of facilitating creation of an assembly that would just be a group of émigré New England hustlers and plunderers, Murray created a governor’s council which functioned as a sort of legislature and packed it with his supporters, and sympathizers of the French Canadians.
The greedy American merchants of Montréal and Québec had enough influence with the board of trade in London, a cabinet office, to have Murray recalled in 1766 for his pro-French attitudes. He was a victim of his support for the civil rights of his subjects, but was replaced by a like-minded governor, the very talented Sir Guy Carleton, [later he became] Lord Dorchester. Murray and Carleton had both been close comrades of General Wolfe. […]
The British had doubled their national debt in the Seven Years’ War and the largest expenses were incurred in expelling the French from Canada at the urgent request of the principal American agent in London, Benjamin Franklin. As the Americans were the most prosperous of all British citizens, the British naturally thought it appropriate that the Americans should pay the Stamp Tax that their British cousins were already paying. The French Canadians had no objection to the Stamp Tax, even though it paid for the expulsion of France from Canada.
As Murray and Carleton foresaw, the British were not able to collect that tax from the Americans; British soldiers would be little motivated to fight their American kinfolk, and now that the Americans didn’t have a neighboring French presence to worry them, they could certainly be tempted to revolt and would be very hard to suppress. As Murray and Carleton also foresaw, the only chance the British would have of retaining Canada and preventing the French Canadians from rallying to the Americans would be if the British crown became symbolic in the mind of French Canada with the survival of the French language and culture and religion. Carleton concluded that to retain Québec’s loyalty, Britain would have to make itself the protector of the culture, the religion, and also the civil law of the French Canadians. From what little they had seen of it, the French Canadians much preferred the British to the French criminal law. In pre-revolutionary France there was no doctrine of habeas corpus and the authorities routinely tortured suspects.
In a historically very significant act, Carleton effectively wrote up the assurances that he thought would be necessary to retain the loyalty of the colony. He wanted to recruit French-speaking officials from among the colonists to give them as much self-government as possible while judiciously feeding the population a worrisome specter of assimilation at the hands of a tidal wave of American officials and commercial hustlers in the event of an American takeover of Canada.
After four years of lobbying non-stop in London, Carleton gained adoption of the Québec Act, which contained the guaranties he thought necessary to satisfy French Canada. He returned to a grateful Québec in 1774. The knotty issue of an assembly, which Québec had never had and was not clamoring for, was ducked, and authority was vested in a governor with an executive and legislative Council of 17 to 23 members chosen by the governor.
Conveniently, the liberality accorded the Roman Catholic Church was furiously attacked by the Americans who in their revolutionary Continental Congress reviled it as “a bloodthirsty, idolatrous, and hypocritical creed … a religion which flooded England with blood, and spread hypocrisy, murder, persecution, and revolt into all parts of the world”. The American revolutionaries produced a bombastic summary of what the French-Canadians ought to do and told them that Americans were grievously moved by their degradation, but warned them that if they did not rally to the American colours they would be henceforth regarded as “inveterate enemies”. This incendiary polemic was translated, printed, and posted throughout the former New France, by the Catholic Church and the British government, acting together. The clergy of the province almost unanimously condemned the American agitation as xenophobic and sectarian incitements to hate and needless bloodshed.
Carleton astounded the French-Canadians, who were accustomed to the graft and embezzlement of French governors, by not taking any payment for his service as governor. It was entirely because of the enlightened policy of Murray and Carleton and Carleton’s skill and persistence as a lobbyist in the corridors of Westminster, that the civil and cultural rights of the great majority of Canadians 250 years ago were conserved. The Americans when they did proclaim the revolution in 1775 and officially in the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776, made the British position in Canada somewhat easier by their virulent hostility to Catholicism, and to the French generally.
How Accurate is Saving Private Ryan? – WW2 D-Day Special
World War Two
Published 16 Aug 2022How accurate is that famous beach scene in Saving Private Ryan? Is it true to the history or just another Hollywood story? Seeing as we’re about to start the filming for our massive D-Day project, we figured we’d break it down, shot by shot.
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“This is her advice: Get Married and Make Sure You Stay Married”
Elizabeth Nickson was a feminist entrepreneur (although I’m sure she would not have used that word to describe herself) in her early 20s, earning money to support herself by pushing feminist ideology through theatrical performance and running consciousness raising sessions. It was, as she says, “fashionable”. She now realizes that the changes to sexual belief and behaviour led directly to the modern “hook-up” culture young people now have to navigate to find relationships:
A new book, the Case Against Sexual Revolution, A New Guide to Sex in the 21st Century, written by Louise Perry, a young writer for the New Statesman is published at the end of this month. Perry volunteers in rape centers, and works for the campaign group We Can’t Consent To This, which documents cases in which UK women have been killed and defendants have claimed in court that they died as a result of ‘rough sex’.
This is her advice: Get Married and Make Sure You Stay Married.
Dramatically well-argued and sourced, Perry goes through every “innovation” in the sexual space and demonstrates without flinching, that all of it, all of it, privileges a particular subset of male, the sociosexual male – the kind that preferences quantity over quality – and not only that the worst kind of sociosexual male. The kind who like choking women, the rapists, abusers, serial womanizers, the pedophiles, the pimps, and the traffickers.
Decades later, says Perry, the mothers and grandmothers of 2nd and 3rd stage feminism have created hook-up culture as the near exclusive method of finding a mate. She details the unassailable fact that women, by their very nature, by their evolutionary history, and their specific biology are victimized in every move of hook-up culture, which ruthlessly uses their femininity, their gentleness, kindness, and agreeableness against them. It coarsens men, inflames their worst natures and has turned the netherworld of the sexual marketplace into a vicious free-for-all, a Darwinian thrash-hunt of the most vulnerable.
Everyone is hurt by it. Without exception.
I live in a place socially advanced, jokingly known as the end of the hippie trail. It is prosperous because it is one of the most beautiful places in the world. But, because it is environmentally advanced, our population is aging. The young and busy cannot start businesses or families here, because the environmental regulation is so strict, they cannot afford it. The human wreckage of the sexual revolution, therefore, is on full display. The streets and markets are littered with broken older men and women, long divorced or separated, the women especially living on crumbs, alone and destined to die alone, many without family. Hey, but their 20s and 30s were free. They got to have sex with dozens, if not hundreds of gorgeous men or women. And they used all the drugs.
If you look hard enough, you will see the same people drifting along the margins of every city and town. Break sexual norms, you break the family, and then you break the culture. What is left is pitiable.
Perry makes the point that I have tried to make hundreds of times in the past 20 years. So many of the political aims of upper-middle-class work for them, but for no one else. They are luxury beliefs. Upper-middle-class mothers do not send their gorgeous teens away to college now without very stern warnings about what might happen to them. Without a full delineating of the horrors that attend hooking up. But the less advantaged, those who swallow the propaganda of the culture do not.
The DeLorean Story
Big Car
Published 5 Jan 2020There’s much more to the DeLorean Motor Company than Doc’s 88mph time machine in Back to the Future. It’s a story of a playboy founder with a meteoric rise, a story of hope and regeneration in an area torn apart after a decade of fighting, and of a cocaine smuggling fall from grace. Yes, this story has it all!
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QotD: How pre-modern polytheistic religions originated
… normally when you ask what the ancients knew of the gods and how they knew it, the immediate thought – quite intuitively – is to go read Greek and Roman philosophers discussing on the nature of man, the gods, the soul and so on. This is a mistake. Many of our religions work that way: they begin with a doctrine, a theory of how the divine works, and then construct ritual and practice with that doctrine as a foundation.
This is exactly backwards for how the ancients, practicing their practical knowledge, learn about the gods. The myths, philosophical discussions and well-written treatises are not the foundation of the religion’s understanding of the gods, but rather the foaming crest at the top of the wave. In practice, the ruminations of those philosophers often had little to do the religion of the populace at large; famously Socrates’ own philosophical take on the gods rather upset quite a lot of Athenians.
Instead of beginning with a theory of the divine and working forwards from that, the ancients begin with proven methods and work backwards from that. For most people, there’s no need to know why things work, only that they work. Essentially, this knowledge is generated by trial and error.
Let’s give an example of how that kind of knowledge forms. Let’s say we are a farming community. It is very important that our crops grow, but the methods and variations in how well they grow are deep and mysterious and we do not fully understand them; clearly that growth is governed by some unseen forces we might seek the aid of. So we put together a ritual – perhaps an offering of a bit of last year’s harvest – to try to get that favor. And then the harvest is great – excellent, we have found a formula that works. So we do it next year, and the year after that.
Sometimes the harvest is good (well performed ritual there) and sometimes it is bad (someone must have made an error), but our community survives. And that very survival becomes the proof of the effectiveness of our ritual. We know it works because we are still here. And I mean survival over generations; our great-great-grandchildren, for whom we are nameless ancestors and to whom our ritual has always been practiced in our village can take solace in the fact that so long as this ritual was performed, the community has never perished. They know it works because they themselves can see the evidence.
(These sorts of justifications are offered in ancient works all the time. Cicero is, in several places, explicit that Roman success must, at the first instance, be attributed to Roman religio – religious scruples. The empire itself serves as the proof of the successful, effective nature of the religion it practices!)
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: Practical Polytheism, Part I: Knowledge”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2019-10-25.
August 18, 2022
The Communist Spies in America’s Atomic Program – WW2 – Spies & Ties 22
World War Two
Published 15 Aug 2022The NKVD have wormed their way into British society. Across the pond, America is also teeming with communist spies. They’re in the government, military, even OSS, and the FBI. Now they’re going for the biggest secret of all – the atomic bomb.
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