Forgotten Weapons
Published 16 Mar 2018The Beretta 38A is not a gun that comes to mind for many people today when discussing World War Two submachine guns, but at the time it was one of the most desirable guns of its type. So — does it live up to that reputation?
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My contacts on social media have probably gotten tired of me pointing out that any big organization will perform less well than a smaller one in the same activity, and governments across the western world have been growing bigger and less competent every year. Sarah Hoyt recalls the time she saw an almost Soviet display of big government incompetence on a visit to her native Portugal:
The last time I was in Portugal I got to witness (actually the time before last, while running through the Lisbon airport) something I’d only previously read about as being normal in the Soviet Union: structures that were being built and decaying, simultaneously, which seems impossible, but I assure you it’s not.
[…]
The question is: competence has existed, and had high marks. We know it existed at various times, because their works survive: the landscape of Europe is still littered with Roman bridges and aqueducts, not to mention Roman roads. Cathedrals and monuments abound. Our own country has marvels of engineering and construction still standing and you don’t have to fix daily.
So, where did that competence go? And why does no one seem to know how to do anything. (Here as an aside, almost everything I learned to do competently had to be learned on my own, and often against massive resistance.)
Well, for about a hundred years now, we’ve been under the ideological ascent of socialism. And socialism — international socialism, to be precise — is only good for creating picturesque ruins. (The romantics would have loved them.)
Note that I’m not defending national socialism. As I’ve pointed out before, when the government takes over the economic life of a country, and directs what the companies can or cannot do, the tendency is to quash innovation, and as a rule everyone becomes very poor.
It’s just that it depends. Like empires (which to an extent they are) national socialist regimes can do okay under an extraordinary ruler. I had a mini-dispute with Herb in the comments on whether Franco was or was not Fascist. He absolutely was, both in the economic, and in the repressive, take over every minutia of life aspect. He was also better than the average bear at directing the economic life of the country which is why before his death we used to go shop in Spain, where more and better goods were available than in Portugal.
Relatively speaking, Salazar was a softer leader. Or at least, he stomped less on the opposition (while making more noises about stomping. It’s the Portuguese way.) But as an economic leader (director of the economic life. Führer if you will. Or where did you think that came from?) he sucked. He sucked upside down and sideways and with his head in a sack. And that’s because he was raised by Jesuits, and got his economic theories from them. Which pretty much tells you everything you need to know. So over his rule, everyone became increasingly poorer. But weirdly not incompetent. (In fact, as a person who — there and here — likes to follow craftsmen around watching how they do things, the average craftsman who learned his trade under national socialism, was probably way better than anyone else.)
Which brings us to: how does international socialism/communism not only destroy competency but introduce incompetency and corruption to the degree it is enforced/implemented.
Timeline – World History Documentaries
Published 15 May 2019Travel journalist Simon Calder takes a journey from across the south of England — by bike, rail and car. In this documentary film, Simon explores the legacy of the Beeching railway cuts. He examines the arguments for reopening some of the branch lines axed in the 1960s.
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Historia Civilis
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Update 6 Feb 2024: Dr. Gabb replaced the original part 7 which discussed the cultural impact of Ancient Greece on the rising Roman Republic.
seangabb
Published 20 Feb 2021
In 120 BC, Rome was a republic with touches of democracy. A century later, it was a divine right military dictatorship. Between January and March 2021, Sean Gabb explored this transformation with his students. Here is one of his lectures. All student contributions have been removed.Here is the seventh lecture, which discusses the Catiline Conspiracy and the rise and disintegration of the First Triumvirate of Caesar, Pompey and Crassus. There is a digression on Eastern politics and the Parthian Empire.
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Historigraph
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One interesting thing about tank evolution that never gets mentioned in America is just how good the Soviets were at making tanks. The Germans are always assumed to have been the great tank builders, followed by the Americans, but it was the Russians who dominated the field in the tank game. Russian tanks were fast, powerful and easy to operate by their crews. Most important, they were reliable in all weather. The Russians assumed they would be fighting in horrible conditions and built a tank for it.
The Germans, in contrast, made one error after another when it came to tank design and tank building. They were obsessed with coming up with the biggest, most powerful tank, rather than making lots of good enough tanks. The result was lots of innovative designs, but most were failures and there was never enough of them. The Panzer IV was a very good tank with a platform that was flexible, but the Germans kept trying to come up with a super tank, rather than make lots of these. That was a costly error.
The American tank, which was used by the British, was not a great tank, but they were cheap and reliable, which meant there were loads of them. It was also a flexible platform for all sorts of other uses. The Sherman tank was about using the two advantages the Americans had over the Germans. One was more industry and the other was more soldiers. The plan was to beat the Germans with volume. While it would take five Sherman tanks to take out a German tank, that was math that worked in favor of the Americans.
This conflict between the perfect and the good enough showed up in many places during the war. The Germans seemed to look at the whole thing as an engineering project. The first step was to accept the restraints and then solve for the variables. The Russian and American view was always to limit the constraints and thereby increase the number of possible right answers. The Germans had much better human capital, but their opponents always had many more choices. They also had numbers, which counts for a lot.
The Z Man, “Tanking It”, The Z Blog, 2019-03-01.
World War Two
Published 26 Mar 2021The British are attacking the Mareth Line in North Africa while the Americans hit the Axis flank, but the Allies are withdrawing in Burma. It’s the Germans who are pulling back in the USSR, though, and there is another attempt from within German Command to assassinate Adolf Hitler.
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In the most recent Weekly Dish, Andrew Sullivan looks at the quasi-Imperial goals of Vladimir Putin:
Imperial Standard of the Emperor of Russia, used from 1858 to 1917.
Image by Trajan 117 via Wikimedia Commons.
“The huge iceberg Russia, frozen by the Putin regime, cracked after the events in Crimea; it has split from the European world, and sailed off into the unknown,” – Vladimir Sorokin, New York Review of Books, 2017.
The greatest mistake liberals make when assessing reactionaryism is to underestimate it. There is a profound, mesmerizing allure — intensified by disillusion with the shallows of modernity — to the idea of recovering some great meaning from decades or centuries gone by, to resurrect and resuscitate it, to blast away all the incoherence and instability of post-modern life into a new collective, ancient meaning.
Even when it’s based on bullshit. You’d be amazed how vacuous slogans about returning to a mythical past — “Make America Great Again!”, “Take Back Control!” — can move public opinion dramatically in even the most successful modern democracies. That’s one reason it’s self-defeating for liberals to press for maximal change in as many things as possible. National identity, fused often with ethnic heritage, has not disappeared in the human psyche — as so many hoped or predicted. It has been reborn in new and strange forms. Now is the time of monsters, so to speak. Best not to summon up too many.
This, it seems to me, is what many of us have missed about the newly visible monster of post-Communist Russia. It would be hard to conjure up a period of post-modern bewilderment more vividly than Russia in the post-Soviet 1990s. A vast empire collapsed overnight; an entire totalitarian system, long since discredited but still acting as some kind of social glue and cultural meaning, unraveled in chaos and confusion.
Take away a totalitarian ideology in an instant, and a huge vacuum of meaning will open up, to be filled by something else. We once understood this. When Nazi Germany collapsed in total military defeat, the West immediately arrived to reconstruct the society from the bottom up. We de-Nazified West Germany; we created a new constitution; we invested massively with the Marshall Plan, doing more for our previous foe than we did for a devastated ally like Britain. We filled the gap. Ditto post-1945 Japan.
But we left post-1991 Russia flailing, offering it shock therapy for freer markets, insisting that a democratic nation-state could be built — tada! — on the ruins of the Evil Empire. We expected it to be reconstructed even as many of its Soviet functionaries remained in place, and without the searing experience of consciousness-changing national defeat. What followed in Russia was a grasping for coherence, in the midst of national humiliation. It was more like Germany after 1918 than 1945. It is no surprise that this was a near-perfect moment for reactionism to stake its claim.
It came, like all reactionary movements, not from some continuous, existing tradition waiting to be tweaked or deepened, but from intellectuals, making shit up. They created a near-absurd mythology they rescued from the 19th and early 20th centuries — packed with pseudo-science and pseudo-history. Russia was not just a nation-state, they argued; it was a “civilization-state”, a whole way of being, straddling half the globe and wrapping countless other nations and cultures into Mother Russia’s spiritual bosom. Russians were genetically different — infused with what the reactionary theorist Lev Gumilev called “passionarity” — a kind of preternatural energy or will to power. They belonged to a new order — “Eurasia” — which would balance the Atlantic powers of the US and the UK, and help govern the rest of the world.
toldinstone
Published 2 Oct 2018This second episode of our History of Rome presents the Rostra, the speaking platform in the Roman Forum, as a key to understanding the turbulent world of the Late Republic. It focuses on the career of Cicero, Rome’s greatest orator, who was successively applauded and impaled on the Rostra.
If you enjoyed this video, you might be interested in my forthcoming book Naked Statues, Fat Gladiators, and War Elephants: Frequently Asked Questions about the Ancient Greeks and Romans.
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Real Time History
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In the beginning of Napoleon’s invasion of Russia, the Russian Tsar Alexander I was under pressure to rally his people. A month into the campaign he declared the The Patriotic War (Отечественная война) to fight back Napoleon — who was already having serious supply issues and a deteriorating logistics network.
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Boudon, Jacques-Olivier. Napoléon et la campagne de Russie en 1812. 2021.
Chandler, David. The Campaigns of Napoleon, Volume 1. New York 1966.
Clausewitz, Carl von. Hinterlassene Werke des Generals Carl von Clausewitz über Krieg und Kriegsführung. Siebenter Band, Der Feldzug von 1812 in Rußland, der Feldzug von 1813 bis zum Waffenstillstand und der Feldzug von 1814 in Frankreich. Berlin 1835.
Geschichte der Kriege in Europa seit dem Jahre 1792 als Folgen der Staatsveränderung in Frankreich unter König Ludwig XVI., neunter Teil, 1. Band. Berlin 1839.
Hartwich, Julius von. 1812. Der Feldzug in Kurland. Nach den Tagebüchern und Briefen des Leutnants Julius v. Hartwich. Berlin 1910.
Holzhausen, Paul. Die Deutschen in Russland 1812. Leben und Leiden auf der Moskauer Heerfahrt. Berlin 1912.
Lieven, Dominic. Russia Against Napoleon. 2010.
Mikaberidze, Alexander. “The Lion of the Russian Army”: Life and Military Career of General Prince Peter Bagration 1765-1812. PhD Dissertation, 2003.
Rey, Marie-Pierre. L’effroyable tragédie: une nouvelle histoire de la campagne de Russie. 2012.
Robson, Martin. A History of the Royal Navy: the Napoleonic Wars. 2014.
Tagebuch des Königlich Preußischen Armeekorps unter Befehl des General-Leutnants von Yorck im Feldzug von 1812. Berlin 1823.
Zamoyski, Adam. 1812: Napoleon’s Fatal March on Moscow. 2005.
Безотосный В. М. Россия в наполеоновских войнах 1805–1815 гг. (Москва: Политическая энциклопедия, 2014)
Отечественная война 1812 года. Энциклопедия (Москва: РОССПЭН, 2004)» OUR STORE
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Jordan Peterson is probably the second-most polarizing living Canadian — after Justin the Lesser, of course — but his collection of early Soviet art and propaganda posters is perhaps one of the more surprising things about him:
“Mother Russia” by topsafari is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0
I’ve been in homes that have displayed unusual artwork, including one house decorated in African-themed pieces that many would consider pornographic. But I don’t believe I’ve ever seen anything quite as unusual and unique as the art in Jordan Peterson’s home.
To be clear, I’ve never actually visited Peterson’s house. But his home and its artwork are described in some detail by Norman Doidge, who wrote the foreword to Peterson’s best-selling book 12 Rules for Life.
Doidge met Peterson in 2004 at a gathering hosted by mutual friends, a pair of Polish emigres who came of age during the days of the Soviet empire. At the time, Peterson was a professor at the University of Toronto, and he and Doidge — a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst — soon became friends. (Apart from their scientific interests, it seems the men shared a passion for the great books, particularly “soulful Russian novels”.)
Doidge visited Peterson on more than one occasion, and he describes the Peterson house as “the most fascinating and shocking middle-class home I had seen.” Among the fascinations was an impressive collection of unusual artwork.
“They had art, some carved masks, and abstract portraits, but they were overwhelmed by a huge collection of original Socialist Realist paintings of Lenin and the early Communists commissioned by the USSR,” writes Doidge. “Paintings lionizing the Soviet revolutionary spirit completely filled every single wall, the ceilings, even the bathrooms.”
Books and art can tell you a great deal about people, as I said, but one must be careful to not draw the wrong conclusions. Which invites an important question: Why was Peterson’s home covered in Soviet era artwork?
One might assume that Peterson was a socialist. Yet, this is not the case. Or maybe, one might guess, Peterson began gobbling up Soviet propaganda pieces following the fall of the Soviet Union simply as investment. (I wish I had possessed the foresight to buy up a bunch of vintage Soviet art following the fall of the Soviet empire; alas, I was only 12.) Perhaps, but this wouldn’t explain why it’s displayed throughout his home.
Fortunately, Doidge offers us an answer.
“The paintings were not there because Jordan had any totalitarian sympathies, but because he wanted to remind himself of something he knew he and everyone else would rather forget: that over a hundred million people were murdered in the name of utopia,” Doidge writes.
Herodotus seems to be at the start of it, at least in our sources – he relates a story where, after an embarrassing failure in an effort to reduce tiny Tegea to helotage (the Tegeans kicked the Spartans’ asses) in the mid-sixth century, the Spartans supposedly stole the bones of the hero Orestes. Consequently, Herodotus notes, the Spartans were from that point on able to always beat Tegea and subdued the Peloponnese (Hdt. 1.68), resulting in the creation of the Spartan-led Peloponnesian League. The unbeatable Spartans thus appear. It’s possible the Spartan reputation predated this, but – as we’ll see – Herodotus will be the one who codifies that reputation and cements it.
Except, hold on a minute – how hard was it to subdue the Peloponnese? It seems to have been done with a fairly adept mix of diplomacy and military force (champion one side in a local dispute, beat the other, force both into your alliance, repeat, see Kennell (2010), 51-3 for details). But it is little surprise that Sparta would be dominant in the Peloponnese. Messenia and Laconia together was around 2,600 square miles or so. This is – if you’ll pardon the expression – flippin’ massive by the standards of Greek poleis. More than twice as large as the next largest polis in all of Greece (Athens). Sparta is fully one-third of the Peloponnese (the peninsula Sparta is located on). The remaining two-thirds is home to many other poleis – Corinth, Argos, Elis, Tegea, Mantinea, Troezen, Sicyon, Lepreum, Aigeira and on and on. Needless to say, Sparta was several times larger than all of them – only Corinth and Argos came even remotely close in size. The population differences seem to have roughly followed land area. Sparta was just much, MUCH larger and more powerful than any nearby state by the start of the fifth century.
Sparta thus spends the back half of the 500s as the teenager beating up all of the little kids in the sandbox and making himself leader. When you are upwards of three times larger (and in some cases, upwards of ten times larger) than your rivals, a reputation for victory should not be hard to achieve. And, in the event, it turns out it wasn’t.
Which brings us back to Herodotus […] because he isn’t just observing the Spartan reputation, Herodotus is manufacturing the Spartan reputation. Herodotus is our main source for early Greek history (read: pre-480) and for the two Persian invasions of Greece. Herodotus’ Histories cover a range of places and topics – Persia, Greece, Scythia, Egypt – and contain a mixture of history, ethnography, mythology and straight up falsehoods. But – as François Hartog famously pointed out in his The Mirror of Herodotus (originally in French as Le Miroir d’Hérodote), Herodotus is writing about Greece, even when he is writing about Persia – those other cultures and places exist to provide contrasts to the things that Herodotus thinks bind all of the fractious and fiercely independent Greek poleis. And he is perfectly willing to manufacture the past to make it fit that vision.
Sparta has a role to play in that narrative: the well-governed polis, a bastion of freedom, ever opposed to tyranny, be it Greek or Persian. We’ll come back to Sparta’s … let’s say relationship … with Persian “tyranny” next week. But for Herodotus, Sparta is the expression of an ideal form of “Greekness” and in Herodotus’ logic, being well-governed (eunomia is the Greek term) results primarily in military excellence. For the story Herodotus is telling to work, Sparta – as one of the leading states resisting Persia – must be well governed and it must be militarily excellent. That’s what will make a good story – and Herodotus never lets the facts get in the way of a good story.
(Sidenote: Athens – at least post-Cleisthenic Athens – gets this treatment too. Athens ends up embodying a different set of “Greek” virtues and where Sparta shows its prowess on land, the Athenians do so at sea.)
And so, Herodotus – the myth-maker – talks up the Spartiates at Thermopylae (you know, the brave 300) and quietly leaves out the other Laconians (who, if you scrutinize his numbers, he knows must be there, to the tune of c. 900 men), downplaying the other Greeks. Spartan leadership is lionized, even when it makes stupid mistakes (Thermopylae, to be clear, was a military disaster and Spartan intransigence nearly loses the battle of Plataea, but Herodotus represents this as boldness in the face of the enemy; even more fantastically inept was the initial Spartan plan to hold on the Isthmus of Corinth as if no one had ever seen a boat before).
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: This. Isn’t. Sparta. Part VI: Spartan Battle”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2019-09-20.
Forgotten Weapons
Published 4 May 2017The MAS-38 was France’s first officially adopted submachine gun, rushed into service in 1940. It was basically too late to help with the defense of France, with less than a thousand delivered by June 1940. The Germans kept the gun in production, making 20-30 thousand under the designation MP722(f). French production picked up immediately after the war, and 203,000 were made by the end of 1951. The gun would see service mostly in Indochina.
Mechanically, the MAS 38 is a simple blowback SMG, although it has a few unusual features. One is the approximately 6 degree angle between the barrel and receiver, which was done in order to drop the stock and allow a sight picture with shorter iron sights. As a result, the bolt face is also cut at about a 6 degree angle off perpendicular. The safety is the trigger itself, which folds up and forward to engage, locking the bolt in place. The weapon is chambered for the 7.65 French Long cartridge, which was also used in the 1935A and 1935S pistols. It is lighter than most other military submachine gun rounds, roughly on par with 9x18mm Makarov. That reduced ballistic peer does make for a very comfortable and controllable weapon, however.
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Tolkien arrived on the Western Front in June 1916 as a signals officer in the 11th Lancashire Fusiliers, and experienced the agony of the Somme at first hand. In just three and a half months, his battalion lost 600 men. Yet it was now, amid the horror of the trenches, that he began work on his great cycle of Middle-earth stories. As he later told his son Christopher, his first stories were written “in grimy canteens, at lectures in cold fogs, in huts full of blasphemy and smut, or by candlelight in bell-tents, even some down in dugouts under shell fire”.
But he never saw his work as pure escapism. Quite the opposite. He had begun writing, he explained, “to express [my] feeling about good, evil, fair, foul in some way: to rationalise it, and prevent it just festering”. More than ever, he believed that myth and fantasy offered the only salvation from the corruption of industrial society. And far from shaking his faith, the slaughter on the Somme only strengthened his belief that to make sense of this broken, bleeding world, he must look back to the great legends of the North.
Yet The Lord of the Rings is not just a war book. There’s yet another layer, because it’s also very clearly an anti-modern, anti-industrial book, shaped by Tolkien’s memories of Edwardian Birmingham, with its forges, factories and chimneys. As a disciple of the Victorian medievalists, he was always bound to loathe modern industry, since opposition to the machine age came as part of the package. But his antipathy to all things mechanical was all the more intense because he identified them — understandably enough — with killing.
And although Tolkien objected when reviewers drew parallels between the events of The Lord of the Rings and the course of the Second World War, he often did the same himself. Again and again he told his son Christopher that by embracing industrialised warfare, the Allies had chosen the path of evil. “We are attempting to conquer Sauron with the Ring,” he wrote in May 1944. “But the penalty is, as you will know, to breed new Saurons, and slowly turn Men and Elves into Orcs.” Even as the end of the war approached, Tolkien’s mood remained bleak. This, he wrote sadly, had been, “the first War of the Machines … leaving, alas, everyone the poorer, many bereaved or maimed and millions dead, and only one thing triumphant: the Machines”.
“Trivial”, then? Clearly not. Tolkien was at once a war writer and an ecological writer; a product of High Victorianism and also a distant relative of the modernist writers who, like him, were trying to make sense of the shattered world of the Twenties and Thirties. But he wasn’t just a man of his time; he remains a guide for our own.
Dominic Sandbrook, “This is Tolkien’s world”, UnHerd, 2021-12-09.
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