Quotulatiousness

May 20, 2026

The seax as an English ethno-national equivalent to the kirpan

Filed under: Britain, History, Law, Politics, Religion, Weapons — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

As most will know, the UK government has been steadily working to prevent UK citizens from carrying weapons of any time … except the religious exception for Sikhs to carry the kirpan, which is part of their faith. John Carter claims that the case for the Saxons to carry the seax is at least as strong:

Infamously, as one of its many assaults upon British tradition – the latest of which is the end of jury trials, a right Englishmen have enjoyed since the Magna Carta – the decline’s managers disarmed the British people. The right of (Protestant) Englishmen to keep and bear arms was enshrined in the Glorious Revolution’s 1689 Bill of Rights. The Second Amendment of the American Constitution’s Bill of Rights is essentially a reiteration of this ancient right of Englishmen; indeed, one of the complaints of the revolutionary colonists was that their rights as Englishmen were not being respected by the English crown. The right to bear arms was first expressed in the 1689 Bill of Rights, but its origin is much older, in the ancient Germanic understanding that a free man is an armed man, and that only slaves are prohibited the means of assuring their personal security. Britain’s managerial regime spent the twentieth century patiently gnawing away at the right to bear arms. It began its assault with licensing requirements in 1920, finally escalating to absolute bans following the 1988 Hungerford massacre and the 1996 Dunblane massacre.

As with all of its petty oppressions, the excuse for banning firearms has always been public safety, which the Yookish regime claims to prize much more highly than public liberty, which it does not claim to prize at all, that being the only honest thing about it. The sincerity of these invocations of safety is rendered dubious by the simultaneous premium Westminster, Whitehall, Number 10 Downing, and Buckingham Palace place upon the uninterrupted mass importation of humanoid dross from the most violently dysfunctional countries on the planet, which (notably) started in earnest at almost exactly the same time that the British people were disarmed.

It was not enough to take away the tools of self-defence. The principle of self-defence was also effectively eliminated: if a private citizen injures or kills a criminal in the course of defending himself against criminal predation, he will be charged as a criminal himself. The British people are expected to outsource their personal defence to police who refuse to defend them, in a country to which their government deliberately imports as many dangerous men as it can. Notably, defence against dangerous men of diversity is particularly frowned upon, because this is racist; indeed, even to complain about diversity danger is treated as a worse crime than rape, robbery, assault, or murder. The Yookay arrests more people for speechcrime than any other country on the planet.

Since firearms are banned, Britain’s criminal element has turned to knives, leading to a long-standing hysteria over knife crime. “Zombie-style knives” and “ninja swords” were banned in 2024 and 2025, while online knife sales now require 2-step age verification. There have even been calls to ban knives with sharp points, which would present certain challenges to the culinary arts. Meanwhile the stop-and-search policies intended to control knife crime on the streets are routinely derided as racist, as it is (surprise!) overwhelmingly young black men who are caught with concealed knives, which of course they conceal because their intent is to use them in the commission of robbery, assault, and murder. Which the British people are not permitted to defend themselves from, and which the Yookish police refuse to do anything about.

All of this raises the question of why, precisely, Digwa was walking around with a big knife.

The answer to this is that Digwa is a Sikh, and Sikhs have a special carve-out for the kirpan, a ceremonial knife which their religion mandates they carry with them at all times, as (if I understand correctly) a symbol of resistance to oppression and their readiness to always be prepared to defend the weak from injustice. Symbolic or not, the kirpan is a very real knife, with a very real edge.

The special religious dispensation granted Britain’s Sikhs is merely the most visible double-standard when it comes to keeping weapons. We saw another example during the Southport riots, when large numbers of Muslims turned out on the streets with machetes. Rather than arresting the lot of them (which the Yookish authorities couldn’t do, as they were busy filling the prisons with British protesters), the law enforcement officers on the scene advised them to hide their weapons in their mosque, which out of respect for the delicate sensibilities of the vibrant Islamic community the police would certainly never even dream of searching. One wonders just how many mosques are hiding caches of weapons.

Unlike the benevolently blind eye the Yookish authorities cast upon their treasured Muslims, however, the Sikh exemption is actually written into law.

As the Nowak case broke across social media a few days ago, a lot of people called for an end to this double standard. If whites are disarmed, then everyone else should be as well. There should be no special treatment on account of their heathen gods.

This is an understandable position, but I think it’s the wrong one. It is the thought pattern of The Raped.

Rather than wanting to drag Sikhs down to the subbasement of slavish cuckery into which they’ve been pressed, Anglo-Saxons should instead demand that they, too, be allowed to arm themselves.

The Sikh argument is that their faith requires that they be armed at all time.

The Saxon argument is similar to the Sikh, but if anything it is even more fundamental.

The name Saxon derives from the seax, the characteristic short sword carried by the Germanic invaders who made England their home in the 5th century. “Saxon” literally means “the sons of the knife”, “the people of the blade”, or “the swordsmen”.

The very identity of our tribe is intertwined with privately held armaments. This is pre-political; it’s pre-religious; for the Saxon, armaments are an identitarian symbol that goes to the very core of what a Saxon is. To remove the seax from the Saxon is to strip him of his identity. Which, of course, is the avowed goal of the Fabian social engineers who have laboured for generations to reconstitute the definite form of the Anglo-Saxon into a pliable mush of generic, vaguely-defined, ahistorical, and universally extensible “values” that no Anglo-Saxon had even heard of until five minutes ago.

The same principle obviously applies to knife crime. Criminals are opportunistic predators. They avoid hard prey. There’s profit in jacking up easy meat to get a free iPhone, but not so much in getting stabbed into fresh meat yourself. If every Saxon wore a seax, street crime would very rapidly become a non-issue.

Of course, from the perspective of the Yookish governing apparat, the powerlessness of its subjects against criminal predation is quite an insignificant price to pay in exchange for ensuring the powerlessness of the autochthonous helotry against the apparat itself. If anything it’s a bonus. The regular humiliation of being forced to endure low-level criminality encourages a feeling of helplessness. The rainbow communists will therefore never “allow” the Saxon to rearm himself.

But what if the Saxon wore the seax without permission?

LMG-25: The Swiss Toggle-Locked Light Machine Gun

Filed under: Europe, History, Military, Weapons — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Forgotten Weapons
Published 29 Dec 2025

The LMG-25 was designed by Adolph Furrer at Waffenfabrik Bern in the 1920s. Furrer was a devoted fan of the toggle locking system, and also designed a toggle-locked submachine gun that Switzerland (unwisely) adopted in 1941. The LMG-25 was first produced in 1924, adopted in 1925, and remained in production until 1946 with a total of 23,045 standard models and 1,742 optics-equipped fortress models made.

It is chambered for the standard 7.5x55mm Swiss cartridge with a 30-round side-mounted magazine (interchangeable with the later Stgw 57 magazine, incidentally). It is an effective design, if expensive to produce, and served Switzerland well for several decades.
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May 19, 2026

The War People by Lucian Staiano-Daniels

Filed under: Books, Europe, History, Military — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

At Dead Carl and You, Kiran Pfitzner reviews The War People: A Social History of Common Soldiers during the Era of the Thirty Years War and finds it has value in bringing to life some of the ordinary people involved in that bloody, interconnected series of wars that we group together as the Thirty Years’ War:

“Their word for themselves was People. Early seventeenth-century common soldiers were Die Leute, Das Volk, les gens, or la gente. They were Das Kriegsvolk, Die Kriegsleute, les gens de guerre, the War People.” So begins Lucian Staiano-Daniels’s aptly titled The War People: A Social History of Common Soldiers during the Era of the Thirty Years War. Using the technique of micro-history, Staiano-Daniels follows the Mansfeld regiment from its raising in 1625 to its unhappy dissolution in 1627. This unexceptional regiment is notable because of the primary source documentation that survives, specifically its original internal legal records — investigations, debts, trials, and last testaments. Through this unusually immediate resource, we gain glimpses of the reality of the 17th century common soldier and so a clearer view of the social conditions he lived within.

One way Staiano-Daniels situates this investigation is in terms of the relationship between military organization and state-building. Describing the existing historiography, he writes: “In this argument, early-modern states increased their control over their civilian populations in part to raise tax money for larger armies that were inhabited by soldiers who were themselves increasingly well-disciplined”. He instead finds, “neither an intensification of military discipline nor unadulterated thuggishness. The military community was made up of systems of relationships that were subtle, intricate, and disorganized.” (7). These findings are well evidenced, and significant, as earlier literature (drawing on more normative sources like manuals and regulations) asserted the intensification of discipline as part of the emergence of the modern state. Instead, we see states forced to engage in the paradoxically complexly and loosely organized world of the mercenary, unable in this time of crisis and state-emergence to fully subordinate the armed forces they employed.

The 17th century and the Thirty Years’ War serve as an important benchmark in understanding the development of war. In witnessing the lives of the kind of men with which wars of the 17th century were fought, we gain a greater understanding of the society that they moved in. In so doing, we can more easily conceptualize the forces that both constrained and enabled war in the 17th century, producing its particular form. This conception provides the opportunity to more easily understand war in other places and times and what conditions reduced or intensified its violence.

Reading this work as a Clausewitz scholar, I could also not help but see a connection between the culture of the war people and Clausewitz’s support for a national militia or Landwehr as a step towards more inclusive governance. There is, of course, a great distance between the unruly mercenaries of the Thirty Years’ War and the “nation in arms” envisioned by Clausewitz and the other Prussian reformers, but at its core we find a common phenomenon: the connection between military service and rights, personal and political.

This book demonstrates well the value of microhistory; in looking closely at the practices and prevalent attitudes of these soldiers of the 17th century, we gain a more concrete view of the prevailing social conditions. This is not just of interest for its own sake (as social history), but because social conditions greatly shape the practice of war, as Clausewitz tells us. This is so because social conditions both reflect and affect the political conditions that create war, as well as the political purpose that exercises a continuous influence upon it.

“That is not diplomacy. That is national self-harm wearing a lanyard.”

Filed under: Cancon, China, Economics, Europe, Government, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, L. Wayne Mathison responds to a post about the Canadian government’s amazing nonchalance about protecting Canada’s sovereignty:

Canadians voted in a federal election, not in a referendum to turn the country into a Davos policy lab with a maple leaf sticker slapped on the front.

The line “we will never be the 51st state” is easy politics. Most Canadians agree. But then the same elbozos turns around and flirts with every other form of sovereignty dilution they can find.

Join the EU? Canada is not in Europe. Geography still matters, apparently. Joining the EU would mean importing another layer of bureaucracy, regulation, courts, trade rules, and political obligations from people Canadians cannot remove from office. That is not independence. That is outsourcing control with better stationery.

Give China influence over resources? That is even worse. A serious country protects strategic assets: energy, minerals, food, ports, telecom, data, and critical infrastructure. You do not hand leverage over your future to an authoritarian state and then call yourself sophisticated. That is not diplomacy. That is national self-harm wearing a lanyard.

The real issue is this:

Canada’s elites love sovereignty when it means rejecting America.

They seem much less interested in sovereignty when it means resisting Brussels, Beijing, the UN, global finance, or climate bureaucrats.

So the question is fair:

Who voted for Canada to stop acting like a country?

Not Canadians. Not directly.

This is elite mission creep. They run on patriotism, then govern like national borders are an administrative inconvenience.

Other items that popped up in the news over the weekend included the United States Department of War announcing that they will be “pausing” their participation in the Permanent Joint Board on Defence, a US-Canadian body that has been continuously operating since 1940 when US President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Canadian Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King established it in a meeting in Ogdensburg, New York. Is this a big deal? Some people certainly think so:

In a bit of a sudden, surprise move, Under Secretary of War Elbridge “The Biggest Cheese” Colby has announced on X of all places that the Unites States would be pausing participation in the Permanent Joint Board on Defence, the Oldest and most Foundational node of the Canada-US security partnership.

[…]

As we all know, on August 17, 1940, U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt and Canadian Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King met in a railway car in Ogdensburg, New York. They issued the Ogdensburg Declaration, an agreement to create a joint board to study sea, land, and air defense problems.

For over 80 years the PJBD has serves as one of the major intersects of the Canada-US relationship. It has been the forum where we have been able to engage and work collaboratively on matters of National Security, Continental Defence, and Critical Infrastructure.

Obviously, given how late it is for me, I sadly can’t dive head first into things. However, I did wanna get something out there. It’s no doubt a very petty move to make, part of a long line of petty moves between everyone in the last year. The pressure is obviously there to push Canada along, and the inclusion of the Prime Ministers Davos speech by Colby should go as a sign to one of the areas that is troubling the current administration.

Trying to apply pressure through such acts though isn’t something that I think will be successful. Granted, being a bit of a dick and doing petty shit in hopes of manipulating opinions, only for it to backfire due to a general miscalculation, is something this Administration does on the regular, and so I can’t be surprised to see it done here.

Nor is it surprising for the performative PM and his government to be utterly blindsided when one of their petty performances triggers a strong negative reaction from the United States.

Another issue that the Liberals in Ottawa seem to think both uncontroversial and straightforward is one of their batch of anti-civil-liberties bills before Parliament, in this case Bill C-22, which the US Congress considers to be a dangerous attempt to control US companies who do business in Canada:

The government’s plans for lawful access have gone off the rails. In recent days, Signal has warned it would pull out of the Canadian market rather than comply with Bill C-22. Windscribe, the Toronto-headquartered VPN provider, has said it would relocate its headquarters out of Canada and NordVPN has warned it would consider following suit. Apple and Meta have both raised public concerns about the bill’s effect on encryption and cybersecurity. The Canadian Chamber of Commerce, the Cybersecurity Advisors Network, civil liberties groups, and a long line of legal and security experts have all called for changes. The chairs of the U.S. House Judiciary and Foreign Affairs Committees have written to Public Safety Minister Gary Anandasangaree warning that the bill threatens U.S. national security and the integrity of cross-border data flows. Even the bill’s own oversight body, the National Security and Intelligence Review Agency, has told the SECU committee it does not have the access it needs for effective oversight. If the government thought it could push through the bill largely unnoticed, it has been proven painfully wrong as there are now trade frictions with the U.S., the prospect of leading companies exiting the Canadian market, and weaker cybersecurity protections for ordinary users.

[…]

The bill nominally protects against the worst outcome through a systemic vulnerability safeguard, which says that core providers are not required to comply with a regulation if compliance would require the introduction or maintenance of a systemic vulnerability. But the safeguard falls apart on careful reading. First, the term “systemic vulnerability” lacks specificity in the statute, which means the government could define encryption and vulnerability narrowly enough to hollow out the protection. Second, Sections 5(5) and 7(5) state that providers are not required to comply where doing so would result in a systemic vulnerability, but Sections 12 and 13 unconditionally require compliance with orders and provide that orders prevail over inconsistent regulations. The net effect is that providers are stuck with contradictory provisions in a system shrouded in secrecy and which could lead to the weakening of security systems. That is why Signal, Windscribe, NordVPN, Apple, Meta, the Canadian Chamber of Commerce, the Cybersecurity Advisors Network, and the U.S. Congress are raising the alarm.

The best approach to address these risks is to go back to the drawing board on Part 2 of the bill. Committee hearings should be extended to ensure that the long list of expert witnesses, industry voices, and international counterparts who have asked for changes receive a full hearing. Further, real amendments should be on the table that better balance law enforcement needs with Canadians’ privacy rights. Failure to do so will result in some of the world’s most privacy-protective services exiting the market, leaving behind a law that is vulnerable to constitutional challenge with millions of Canadians facing genuine privacy and cybersecurity risks.

The Gracchi – socialists avant la lettre?

Filed under: Europe, Government, History — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

The Gracchi brothers — Tiberius and Gaius Gracchus — were Tribunes of the Plebs in the Roman Republic during the second century BC. Tiberius had been a rising star within the cursus honorum until he was involved in a military disaster that seriously tarnished his reputation and derailed his political career. His attempt to regain his former upward march through the offices of the Republic involved running for election as Tribune and then forcing a major land “reform” through using tactics that bent or even broke the traditional way things were done (the mos maiorum – the unwritten constitution of the Republic).

Handre makes the case that the Gracchi were indeed socialists before the term was coined:

The Gracchi brothers destroyed Rome’s property rights in 133 BC, then wondered why their republic collapsed within a century. Tiberius and Gaius Gracchus seized private land through legislative force, redistributing it to landless citizens under the banner of “reform”. They created the template for every socialist redistribution scheme that followed.

Rome’s wealthy families had legitimately acquired vast estates (latifundia) through conquest, purchase, and development. The land generated wealth, employed thousands, and fed the empire. The Gracchi saw inequality and decided government theft would solve it. Tiberius bypassed the Senate entirely, appealing directly to popular assemblies who voted themselves other people’s property. When senators objected to this constitutional violation, Tiberius had his colleague Octavius deposed. Pure mob rule.

The economic consequences arrived swiftly. Landowners stopped investing in improvements, knowing politicians could seize their property at will. Agricultural productivity declined as redistributed plots went to inexperienced farmers who lacked capital for proper cultivation. Food shortages followed. The Gracchi had broken the link between productive effort and reward, destroying incentives across the entire system.

Worse than the economic damage was the political precedent. Future demagogues learned they could buy votes by promising to redistribute wealth from productive citizens to political supporters. Marius, Sulla, Pompey, and Caesar all followed the Gracchi playbook, using land redistribution to build personal armies of grateful beneficiaries.

Property rights form the foundation of civilization itself. When politicians can seize private property through majority vote, you get warlords fighting over the spoils while your economy burns.

The period of the Republic featuring the Gracchi have been discussed at some length before.

How to Eat Like a Medieval Peasant

Filed under: Britain, Food, History — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Tasting History with Max Miller
Published 25 Nov 2025

Boiled carp fillets with a thick garlic-walnut sauce

City/Region: England
Time Period: c. 1450

In addition to their regular schedule of backbreaking work, medieval European peasants often had to work extra days for their lord, called boon days. The upside to this was that the peasants were given better food on boon days, which could include cheese, good bread, ale, meat, and fish.

While the medieval cookbooks we have today were written for the wealthy, these seemed like good choices if a lord wanted to feed their serfs: good, but not too good, and fancier than their everyday fare, but not heavily spiced like the nobility’s dishes.

I’d never tried carp before and thought it was quite good, and the garlic is by far the dominant flavor in the sauce. All in all, it’s not amazing, but if I was a medieval peasant, I don’t think I would complain.

    Barbell boyled.
    Take a barbell, and kutte him, and draw him round; And pike in the nape of the hede and seth him in water and salt, Ale, and parcely. And whan hit bygynneth to boile, skeme hit clene, and caste the barbel there-to, And seth him. And his sauce is garlek or vergesauce, And then serve him forth.
    — Harleian MS 4016 (c. 1450)

    Take kernels of walnuts, and cloves of garlic, and pepper, bread, and salt, and cast all in a mortar; and grind it small, & mix it up with the same broth that the fish was sodden in, and serve it forth.
    — Ashmole MS 1439

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May 18, 2026

The American Civil War was “two armed mobs chasing each other around the country, from which nothing could be learned”

Filed under: France, Germany, History, Military, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Ben Duval looks at the implications of the quote above (attributed to Moltke the Elder) and shows that there were indeed lessons to be learned from that conflict:

Chief of the Prussian General Staff Helmuth von Moltke the Elder (1800-1891).
Photo by Carl Günther via Wikimedia Commons.

A famous, if apocryphal, quote attributed to Moltke dismissed the American Civil War as “two armed mobs chasing each other around the country, from which nothing could be learned”. There were certainly lessons to be learned — it could hardly be otherwise in so long and intense a conflict. The war showcased many new technologies on a large scale, including rail and telegraph, while the growing accuracy of firearms showed the growing importance of field fortifications in pitched battle. It also gave witness to many expedients and innovations, including the first known employment of indirect fire (although that would take much longer to be appreciated).

Nevertheless, the readiness with which Moltke’s spurious quote was accepted is suggestive of fundamental differences between Europe’s large professional armies and the hastily-raised volunteers that fought for both North and South. The Civil War saw a mobilization of unprecedented scale, expanding from a pre-war regular army of 15,000 to a total of nearly 2 million at its peak.

At some critical battles, like Antietam, many regiments had mustered bare weeks before. At best, these soldiers could handle their weapons reasonably well; large-scale maneuvers in the heat of combat were out of the question. Even long-serving formations did not have much of a chance to redress these deficiencies, as demonstrated by the disjointed conduct of Pickett’s Charge. What immediate lessons could the Prussian and French, efficiently maneuvering under fire at Gravelotte or Mars-la-Tour, have learned from Civil War armies?

Prussian attack at Gravelotte on 18 August 1870.

Lessons at the Right Level

Perhaps not much at the tactical level, but there was plenty to be learned at the operational. Never before had railroads been employed at such scale to shift troops within and between theaters; nor the telegraph, which was used to coordinate such movements. Efficient logistical services allowed both sides to undertake bold maneuvers involving massive numbers of troops (it is noteworthy how many generals had previous experience working for railroad companies, and how many more went on to high management or board positions after the war).

Union supply wagons loading up at a railhead.

But the point also holds more broadly, beyond the particular technical specialties of 1860s America. Whenever tactics alone cannot suffice—either because both sides are extremely skilled, as in the First World War, or because organizational breakdowns rule out more complex maneuvers — decisive action can by default only occur at the operational level. This was an essential point in Saladin the Strategist. Muslim and Crusader armies, through long experience fighting each other, had developed unique fighting styles tailored to blunt each other’s edges: barring a fluke, decision could only be won through some higher-level maneuver.

In such cases, the fighting capabilities of an army matter less in any absolute sense than in their ability to effect a particular operational scheme. Tactical proficiency is but one variable among many, and not necessarily the most important. Whether a general is dealing with poorly-trained militia or long-serving professionals, it is above all their relative odds that factor into his calculations.

Withdrawing the Black Jack Brigade from Europe

Filed under: Europe, Military, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Depending on your point of view, President Trump’s sudden decision to withdraw a US Army brigade from Europe is either Trump having a temper tantrum yet again or part of an overall plan to reduce US deployment to allied nations who should be able to pay for their own defence. On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, InfantryDort discusses the formation being relocated back to the continental United States:

1st Cavalry Division, 2nd Brigade – “The Black Jack Brigade”

There’s a lot of drama around Black Jack brigade being ordered back to the U.S. from Europe.

I was in that unit on that same mission from 2019-2020.

We deployed, did training there, went to a CTC. I’ll be honest, it was the most fun I’ve probably had in the Army.

But after the initial training and the CTC rotation, we didn’t do much.

Played a lot of softball. BBQs. PT. Some drinking. Mostly just working on keeping people out of trouble.

It was kind of like being back at Fort Hood, but in Germany.

I suppose one could argue that the simple act of us being there made all the difference. I don’t know. That was above my level.

But I couldn’t help but think then, as I do now, that there are better ways to keep one’s adversaries at bay.

To say nothing of the fact that I do believe we have been a crutch to Europe for too long. Everyone seems to forget that Europe as a whole, dwarfs the GDP of Russia. A country who is barely richer than Italy.

You accomplish nothing providing security for people who refuse to do it themselves.

What are we supposed to do? Defend them forever? Permanently?

What has it gotten us? Europe, by all accounts, has taken advantage of our security blanket and prioritized making a socialist hellscape.

A socialist hellscape that has become their chief export. So the very act of remaining there in force is enabling the destruction of the western world.

Our relationship with those people DEMANDS revisiting in my view. Because whatever good will we generated after the end of the Second World War has dried up.

The free flow of money from us to them has also dried up.

It’s very telling how others treat you when you stop doing things for them. This isn’t mutual respect. It’s been little more than bribery.

And I’m all for keeping our Armored brigades right here, building readiness.

And not running them into the ground for little gain.

There is an age old adage that says you must help yourself before you can help others. Prudence demands that for our country right now.

America first. America always.

May 17, 2026

French contributions to the development of wokeness

Filed under: Education, France, History, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Brivael Le Pogam offers an apology to the west for France being so significant in the philosophical and political effluvia of 1968 for setting the conditions in which wokeness was born:

Protesters gathered in the Place du Capitole in Toulouse, 11 or 12 June, 1968.
Photo by André Cros (1926-2021) via Wikimedia Commons.

I want to offer my apologies, on behalf of the French, for giving birth to French Theory (which in turn gave birth to the worst of all ideological monstrosities: wokism).

We gave the world Descartes, Pascal, Tocqueville. And then, in the intellectual ruins of post-1968, we gave Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze. Three brilliant men who forged, in the elegance of our language, the ideological weapon that today paralyzes the West.

We must understand what they did. Foucault taught that truth does not exist, that there are only power relations disguised as knowledge. That science, reason, justice, the medical institution, the school, the prison, sexuality — everything is merely a staging of domination. Derrida taught that texts have no stable meaning, that every signifier slips away, that every reading is a betrayal, that the author is dead and the reader reigns supreme. Deleuze taught that we should prefer the rhizome to the tree, the nomad to the sedentary, desire to the law, becoming to being, difference to identity.

Taken individually, these are debatable theses. Combined, exported, and popularized, they form a system. And that system is a poison.

For here’s what happened. These texts, unreadable in France, crossed the Atlantic. The departments of Yale, Berkeley, and Columbia absorbed them in the 1980s. They found there a soil that did not exist among us: American Puritanism, its racial guilt, its obsession with identity. French Theory married this substratum, and the child of that union is called wokism.

Judith Butler reads Foucault and invents performative gender. Edward Said reads Foucault and invents academic postcolonialism. Kimberlé Crenshaw inherits the framework and invents intersectionality. At every step, the matrix is French: there is no truth, there is only power, so every hierarchy is suspect, every institution is oppressive, every norm is violence, every identity is constructed and thus negotiable, every majority is guilty.

That’s how three Parisian philosophers, who probably never imagined their practical consequences, provided the operating software to an entire generation of activists, university bureaucrats, HR managers, journalists, and legislators. That’s how we ended up with a civilization that no longer knows how to say whether a woman is a woman, whether its own history is worth defending, whether merit exists, whether truth can be distinguished from opinion.

It’s shit for one simple reason, and it must be stated calmly. A civilization stands on three pillars: the belief that there exists a truth accessible to reason, the belief that there exists a good distinct from evil, the belief that there exists a heritage to be transmitted. French Theory set out to dynamite all three. Not out of malice. Out of intellectual play, fascination with suspicion, hatred of the bourgeoisie that had nurtured them. But the result is there. An entire generation learned to deconstruct and never learned to build. An entire generation knows how to suspect and no longer knows how to admire. An entire generation sees power everywhere and beauty nowhere.

I apologize because we French bear a particular responsibility. It’s our language, our universities, our publishers, our prestige that gave this nihilism its chic packaging. Without the legitimacy of the Sorbonne and Vincennes, these ideas would never have crossed the ocean. We exported doubt the way others export weapons.

What is being built now, in Silicon Valley, in AI labs, in startups, in workshops, in all the places where people still make things instead of deconstructing them — that is the response. A civilization is rebuilt by builders, not by commentators. By those who believe that truth exists and is worth devoting oneself to. By those who embrace a hierarchy of the beautiful, the true, the good, and are not ashamed to transmit it.

So, forgive us. And back to work.

Auto-translated by the social media site formerly known as Twitter from the original French post.

Why Didn’t Germans Resist Hitler? – Death of Democracy

Filed under: Germany, Government, History, Media — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

World War Two and Spartacus Olsson
Published 16 May 2026

Why didn’t Germans resist Hitler? Were they all Nazis, or were they terrorized into silence by the Gestapo?

The truth is more unsettling. The Nazi regime ruled through a combination of targeted terror, social atomization, propaganda, popular support, opportunism, and broad accommodation. This episode examines why mass resistance never emerged — and why millions of ordinary Germans accepted, enabled, or benefited from the Third Reich.

00:00 Why didn’t Germans resist Hitler?
00:33 The myth of the all-powerful Gestapo
01:36 Targeted terror and selective repression
02:39 The Nazi seizure of power
03:09 Gleichschaltung and the destruction of civil society
03:38 Inner emigration and private conformity
04:16 Why early Nazi successes mattered
04:33 Unemployment, rearmament, and national pride
05:39 Versailles, trauma, and German victimhood
06:22 Identity, propaganda, and belonging
07:25 Volksgemeinschaft and the “Hitler Myth”
08:54 Kristallnacht and the failure of collective action
10:40 What the numbers suggest
11:47 Postwar surveys and lingering Nazi support
13:31 Terror, consent, and accommodation
15:07 Did this absolve ordinary Germans?
16:16 Democracy, responsibility, and Never Forget

“Communism > Capitalism”

Filed under: China, Economics, Government, History, Quotations, Russia — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Once again, thanks to the auto-translation feature on the social media site formerly known as Twitter, Brivael Le Pogam responds to a fan of the most evil economic system yet devised by man:

“Communism > Capitalism”

Brother. You’re tweeting this from an iPhone. Designed in California. Made in a Chinese factory that only exists because Deng Xiaoping realized in 1978 that Maoism mostly produced corpses and decided to do capitalism in disguise.

The greatest reduction in poverty in human history (China 1980-2020) happened at the exact moment when China stopped doing communism. The greatest famine in human history (China 1958-62, 45M dead) happened at the exact moment when they started.

Same country. Same people. Same territory. Two systems. One built smartphones, the other built mass graves. Pick your side.

Communism’s trophy board:
USSR: collapsed
China: pivoted to capitalism, prospered
Vietnam: pivoted to capitalism, prospered
Cuba: still rationing soap in 2026
North Korea: eating tree bark
Venezuela: sitting on the world’s largest oil reserves, imports gasoline
Cambodia: killed 25% of its own population

Communism isn’t an ideology. It’s a hiring program for people incapable of finding a real job, dressed up as economic theory. When you can’t build, you redistribute. When redistribution fails, you hunt for saboteurs. When you run out of saboteurs, you become someone else’s saboteur.

100 million dead. Zero examples that work. The most expensive LARP in human history.

But please, keep tweeting “Communism > Capitalism” from your capitalist phone, on your capitalist app, funded by capitalist ads. We need the comedy.

QotD: Battlefield morale and cohesion in movies/games versus real history

Filed under: Europe, Gaming, History, Media, Military, Quotations — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

I’ve focused on game morale systems here, but of course this blends over into film as well, where the “mooks” often charge the heroes seemingly utterly heedless of their losses – frequently despite the fact that the last identical group of mooks to do so just got taken apart before their very eyes. And invariably they do this until they are so beaten that they switch to the other binary state, simply running away.

Actual armies have far more than two states of morale and behaved in far more dynamic, unpredictable and interesting ways!

The first problem with this “binary model” of morale is that it assumes just a single factor (“leadership” or “morale”) but in practice we ought to be thinking about at least two different ingredients here: morale and cohesion.

Morale is the commitment the combatants have to their leadership and their cause. To simplify a bit, we might say that soldiers with good morale believe three things: that their cause is a worthy one, that they are on the road to success and that their leaders have a good (enough) plan to achieve final victory. Poor morale can result from a breakdown in any of those three elements: troops might for instance believe both in their goal and its eventual possibility but not in their leaders to produce it (this seems to have been the case, for instance, in the French Mutiny of 1917). On the other hand, regardless of the charisma of leaders, few people come to a war intending to die in it; if the cause appears impossible, morale will sink regardless. And armies that do not believe in the cause at all are extremely difficult to motivate by other means.

On the other hand cohesion is the force that holds a specific unit together through the power of the bonds holding the individual combatants to each other and/or to their (generally junior or non-commissioned) officers. There are a lot of ways to build that cohesion: people are generally unwilling to abandon neighbors, close friends and relatives, for one. They are also reluctant to expose themselves to shame at home for having done so; shame is one of the few things people fear as much, if not more than, death. For armies that can’t rely on that sort of organic cohesion, it can be built by reconstructing the soldier’s unit as his primary social group. Drill can do this: it creates an experience of shared suffering and achievement which bonds the soldiers together creating strong “artificial” cohesion.

These two ingredients have different roots, but they also function differently. The formulation that has always stuck with me is one from James McPherson’s For Cause and Comrades: Why Men Fought in the Civil War (1998): morale (McPherson discusses it under the heading of “the Cause”) will get men into uniform, it will sustain them on large marches and cold nights and it will get them to the battle, but it will not get them through the battle. Instead, cohesion (the “comrades” of the title) gets men through the terror of actual combat, when fear has driven “the cause” far from mind. But of course cohesion isn’t enough on its own either, since it provides no reason to advance or attack or really to do anything at all except stick together.

Adding further complication to this, morale and cohesion are not, as they often exist in games, inherent properties of a unit, but rather emergent properties of the interactions of a whole bunch of individuals. In a strategy game, units exist primarily as extension of the player’s will; in film units typically exist as extensions of their commander’s or the main character’s will (note how common it is that right as the hero begins winning his duel with the villain, so too his army begins winning the battle). But of course actual armies are composed of lots of humans, each with their own individual will and agency.

Those humans are continually making calculations about risks, goals and survival. It’s not hard here to see why, by the by, morale won’t carry troops through high risk conditions: if your only goal is to survive to experience the end-state of the war, then it is always in your interest to let someone else do the dying; it doesn’t serve your end to stay in a high risk position. By contrast, if you are held there by the fear of shame if your close comrades see you run, that still applies. Thus these calculations get progressively more “primal” as the sense of danger rises (fear makes a mess of those higher brain functions), but they do not stop.

Bret Devereaux, “Collections: Total Generalship: Commanding Pre-Modern Armies, Part IIIC: Morale and Cohesion”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2022-07-01.

May 16, 2026

The failure of Operation Crossbow in 1943-45

Filed under: Britain, France, Germany, History, Military, USA, Weapons, WW2 — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Timing is everything in war — well, if not everything, it’s extremely important. An example was the development delays for the German V-1 and V-2 systems that kept them from being a potentially devastating weapon against the Anglo-American invasion forces on D-Day. Secretary of Defense Rock explains why allied air attacks to suppress the German launch sites were an almost unmitigated failure:

German A4 or V-2 replica at Peenemünde
Photo from Wikimedia Commons.

Two campaigns separated by 50 years — the Anglo-American CROSSBOW campaign against German V-weapons in 1943–1945 and the “Great Scud Chase” of Desert Storm in 1991 — suggest that what is happening over Iran today is not a deviation from the norm but simply a repeat of it. As Colonel Mark Kipphut argued in his 1996 study comparing the two campaigns, the failure to internalize CROSSBOW’s lessons was itself one of the reasons those same failures were repeated in 1991; the present campaign against Iran suggests we might still not have learned them.1

The first lesson of CROSSBOW is that fixed infrastructure is easy to destroy and that adversaries do not stay fixed for long. British intelligence had received “reliable and relatively full information” on German long-range weapons as early as November 1939 two months into the war.2 It wasn’t till four years later, in 1943, that Allied photo-reconnaissance first identified the German “ski-sites” in northwestern France, named for the curious shape of one of the buildings on each launcher complex.3 Within weeks, the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey would later report, ninety-six sites had been cataloged, and a sustained bombing offensive against them had begun. Of these ninety-six sites, no more than two were ever used operationally.4 On its face, this was a complete victory. Allied airpower had, by direct attack, denied the Luftwaffe permanent launching infrastructure before the V-1 campaign could begin.5

The Germans drew the obvious conclusion. The Survey noted that during the period of the Allied counterattack, the Germans developed methods for launching V-1s and V-2s from small, inconspicuous sites that required minimal engineering work and freed firing operations from the elaborate sites originally planned.6 These were the “modified sites”, first photographed on April 26, 1944, which were well camouflaged, dependent largely on prefabricated buildings, of which more than sixty had been identified before the first V-1 was launched in England in mid-June.7 The “modified sites”, the Survey concluded plainly, were “heavily bombed without marked effect on the scale of effort”.8

Kipphut, working from the same primary documents, formalizes the consequence as a two-phase division of the campaign. CROSSBOW I, running from April 1943 to early June 1944, was a qualified success: it delayed the start of V-weapon attacks by an estimated three to six months and so allowed OVERLORD to proceed before the full weight of Hitler’s missile arsenal could be brought to bear.9 Eisenhower himself wrote that had the Germans perfected the weapons six months earlier, the invasion of Europe would have been “exceedingly difficult, perhaps impossible”, and that a sustained V-weapons attack on the Portsmouth-Southampton embarkation area could have caused OVERLORD to be written off entirely.10 CROSSBOW II, however, the campaign to suppress launches once they had begun, was in Kipphut’s assessment a “dismal failure”; despite thousands of sorties against more than 250 targets in the critical summer of 1944, the Germans averaged just over 80 launches per day, and German sources contend they never failed to launch on account of either Allied air attack or weapons shortages.11

A World War II map shows the two areas where the Germans were setting up their secret “V” weapons to bombard England (right, center). These are the areas in which the Royal Air Force and 8th Air Force heavy bombers concentrated their bombs in order to knock out the weapons — part of the pre-invasion plan. This event was given the operational code name Crossbow during World War II. The grouping (left, center) is the site of the Invasion of Normandy.

The implications for Allied resource allocation were severe. Between the beginning of May 1943 and the end of March 1944, nearly 40% of Allied reconnaissance sorties over Europe were devoted to supporting CROSSBOW, with those planes taking more than 1.25 million photographs and service members preparing more than 4 million prints for study and analysis.12 Over the course of the campaign, U.S. and British air forces flew approximately 68,913 sorties against CROSSBOW targets and dropped roughly 136,789 tons of munitions.13 During the thirteen-month peak period from August 1943 to August 1944, the joint strategic-bomber effort absorbed 13.7% of its sorties and 15.5% of its tonnage on V-weapon targets.14 By the autumn of 1944 and into the winter, RAF Fighter Command devoted 79% of its offensive sorties to CROSSBOW.15 Eisenhower, faced with the apparent failure of CROSSBOW II to suppress the launches that began on D-Day plus seven, directed that V-weapon suppression take priority over all other Allied air operations, including direct support to the Normandy lodgment and the Combined Bomber Offensive.16

That bombing, which failed against the dispersed V-2 launch sites, was almost overdetermined. The Survey concluded bluntly that after the initial Allied success, the firing sites for V-2s were small, well camouflaged, and made poor targets for bombers.17 No comparable problem arises with a factory complex. The V-2 launcher, like the modified V-1 ramp, was small, mobile, and concealable, and the strategic-bomber instrument was designed and procured to flatten large, stationary targets. In the end, Kipphut notes, silencing the V-weapons required ground forces to overrun the launch sites.18

  1. Mark E. Kipphut, “Crossbow and Gulf War Counter-Scud Efforts: Lessons from History”, Counterproliferation Paper No. 15 (Maxwell AFB, AL: USAF Counterproliferation Center, February 2003), 1–3. Originally published in Airpower Journal, Winter 1996.
  2. Wesley Frank Craven and James Lea Cate, eds., The Army Air Forces in World War II, vol. 3, Europe: Argument to V-E Day: January 1944 to May 1945 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1951), 89.
  3. United States Strategic Bombing Survey, V-Weapons (Crossbow) Campaign, Military Analysis Division, 2nd ed. (Washington, D.C., January 1947), 5–6.
  4. Ibid, 6.
  5. Craven and Cate, eds., have a full chapter on the operational history of CROSSBOW, 84-106.
  6. Ibid, 2.
  7. Ibid, 6.
  8. Ibid, 6.
  9. Kipphut, 7–8.
  10. Dwight Eisenhower, Crusade in Europe (New York: Doubleday, 1948), 260, quoted in Kipphut, 5.
  11. Kipphut, “Crossbow and Gulf War Counter-Scud Efforts”, 8, citing Phillip Henshall, Hitler’s Rocket Sites (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1985), 187.
  12. Craven and Cate, eds., 89.
  13. Kipphut, “Crossbow and Gulf War Counter-Scud Efforts”, 8
  14. USSBS, “V-Weapons (Crossbow) Campaign”, 28.
  15. USSBS, “V-Weapons (Crossbow) Campaign, 28”; Kipphut, 8–9.
  16. Kipphut, 5.
  17. USSBS, “V-Weapons (Crossbow) Campaign”, 7
  18. Kipphut, 10.

QotD: History doesn’t repeat, but sometimes it rhymes

Filed under: Books, Britain, Education, History, Quotations — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

No one would claim for I Commit to the Flames ([Ivor] Brown’s flames, I should add, were meant in an entirely metaphoric sense) that it is a great work, seminal as some critics might put it — nowadays, perhaps, ovular. But, published eighty-six years ago, it is particularly interesting at the present conjuncture. I am not sure whether it is reassuring or depressing that our problems recur, not in precisely the same form of course, and our reactions to them are similar though not identical. It is also worth noticing what has changed.

Let me just quote a couple of passages that might be written with very slight alterations today:

    My object is to relate all the follies of the day to their common origin. The committers of folly, the authors of the rubbish which I commit to my symbolical flames, have not, in all probability, the wit to understand any general principles of puerility. It needs reason to understand that the source of the trouble is a general flight from reason and from the legacy of civilised opinion in which past reason has been embodied. The world increasingly substitutes fisticuffs for argument, flags and symbols for facts and realities, belief in the omnipotence of the sub-conscious for faith in self-determination of the will by reason guided … it teaches its children that impulse is divine. Consequently it has no standards.

Brown asked a question nearly a century ago now that has surely occurred to many of us:

    Why should all acquired knowledge, all human experience, all civilisation be cast aside? It needs sifting, that is acknowledged; but why scrap it? The passion for such root-and-branch abolition invades the arts as well as the schools.

Later, he provides the sketch of an explanation for the radical iconoclasm that he sees in his own time:

    It is a commonplace that the person most easy to deceive is the recipient of a higher education that has failed to be high enough. The schooling system of Europe and America had just reached the stage at which it was creating the pseudo-intellectual in very considerable numbers.

This seems more than ever applicable now: the contemporary pullers-down of statues are educated enough to formulate simplistic generalisations, but not educated enough to appreciate the complexities and ironies of existence.

Theodore Dalrymple, “Sufficiently Educated to Embrace the Simplistic”, The Iconoclast, 2020-09-24.

May 15, 2026

Sweden – “We’re actually trying to get rid of screens as much as possible”

Filed under: Education, Europe, Health, Technology — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 06:00

Back in the early days of the internet, a lot of us were enthusiastic about schools adopting digital technology, as it seemed to be the way of the future for kids to be fully immersed in the online world as part of their education. Reality has harshed the mellow for a lot of us misguided techno-fossils, as there seems to be a very strong correlation between childrens’ (computer) screen use and lower educational achievements. Sweden is trying to reverse this pattern:

“student_ipad_school – 038” by flickingerbrad is licensed under CC BY 2.0 .

According to primary school teachers, many children shamble through the doors today zombified and crying out for their iPads.

Their parents, lined at the school gates, barely say goodbye, what with the hypnotic drivel spewing from their iPhones.

The kids greet their teachers with the YouTube vernacular: “Hi, guys!” When handed a book, they swipe and tear at the unfamiliar paper. They greet each other with: “Welcome to my channel!”

Finally, when they leave, they don’t say goodbye. They say: “Remember to like and subscribe!”

I’m not taking the piss. A friend of mine, tasked with civilising these screen-addled sprogs, confirms what one reads in the newspapers. These chirpy little addicts ransack classrooms crying out for more iPad with the fanatical calculation of tweaking crackheads.

Wherever you may sit on the political spectrum, I hope you agree that a functioning democracy might one day need citizens who can read and write, and who can concentrate beyond a ten-second video clip.

At least one functioning democracy agrees. Recently, Swedish politicians reversed their digital-first obsession by announcing a return to paper and pen. The sensible Swedes have gone analogue. Why? Literacy rates in the cosy Nordic social democracy have collapsed.

“We’re actually trying to get rid of screens as much as possible,” said the Liberal party’s Joar Forsell.

Since 2025, pre-schools are no longer obliged to employ digital ‘tools’ and teachers no longer dole out tablets to kids under two. According to Mr Forsell, reading real books on paper does what schools have for decades avoided: it teaches kids to think. Tablets for toddlers is now från skärm till pärm (from screen to paper.)

High school students now drag their textbooks and notepads to classrooms stripped of screens.

The evidence piles up. Researchers found that hyper-digital tablets-for-toddlers eroded basic skills. Writing by hand, Swedish students learned more and retained more. Wiping away digital mandates, Swedish lawmakers promise more handwriting and books, fewer devices, and quiet reading time.

But it’s not just the Swedes.

Psychologists Pam A. Mueller (Princeton University) and Daniel M. Oppenheimer (UCLA) found handwriting beats typing — at least if learning something is your thing. Students who pecked down verbatim notes on their laptops wrote twice as many words as their pen-and-paper classmates. Who learned and remembered more? Take a guess.

How could this be? Writing by hand is slower. You’re forced to process and reframe information in your own words — the art of thinking. Screens hamper this essential process. When we write by hand, there’s a greater connection between the brain and the finger. This act, they say, cements the information in one’s brain. Essentially, the typists transcribed much. They absorbed little. It’s like paying someone else to have sex for you.

Researchers claim that writing on paper improves everything from recalling a random series of words to grasping and understanding complicated or conceptual ideas. Writing by hand ties down the balloons of motor, visual, and sensory memory.

When studying from their notes, the longhand writers did better on tests. This persisted even when the typists were told to rephrase the material into their own words. They didn’t absorb the material. They parroted it, much like ChatGPT doesn’t know that flipping a glass spills water. It merely knows that the words “flip” and “glass of water” are statistically related to the word “spill”.

And yet, British schools continue marching to the drumbeat of post-literate doom.

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