Whitehall Moll History Clips
Published 7 Jan 2019David Starkey weaves the stories of two great British war leaders: John and Winston Churchill. Hear how John Churchill rose from obscurity to be King James II’s right-hand man.
January 18, 2022
David Starkey – The Churchills episode 1
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A Labour Party attempt to count coup against Boris Johnson may have backfired by showing the NHS in a terrible light
Brendan O’Neill explains why he found the Labour social media post to be a very bad idea:
Not actually the official symbol of Britain’s National Health Services … probably.
This week, in response to the latest drinks-during-lockdown scandal engulfing Downing Street, the Labour Party tweeted something so extraordinary, so tone deaf, so inhumane, that it managed to make Boris and his coterie of rule-breaking hypocrites look almost principled in comparison.
It was a comment from an NHS nurse named only as Jenny (thank God for the absence of Jenny’s surname, for I shudder to think of the abuse she would receive if her full identity were revealed). This is what Jenny, according to Labour, had to say about the government’s boozy get-togethers on 20 May 2020 and other occasions when the rest of us were locked down:
I remember 20 May 2020 vividly, I spent hours on the phone to a man who was in the hospital car park, utterly desperate to see his wife. He begged, wept, shouted to be let in, but we said no – for the greater good of everyone else. She died unexpectedly and alone, as the government had a party.
This is a genuinely extraordinary statement. It is astonishing that no one in the Labour social-media team thought twice about posting it. The aim of this tweet is clearly to make us shake our heads and say “I can’t believe the government had a party while the NHS was making such tough decisions”, but in truth it has the exact opposite effect. It made me, at least, think to myself: “I can’t believe we let people die alone. I can’t believe the howling grief of a desperate man was ignored. I can’t believe there was such a complete and catastrophic collapse in everyday humanity during the lockdown.”
Labour clearly wants us to sympathise with “Jenny” against the government. But I find myself far more disgusted, far more outraged, by Jenny’s behaviour than by Boris Johnson’s. To have a sneaky party during lockdown is one thing. To ignore the pleas of a begging, weeping man and to watch as his wife subsequently died alone is something else entirely. It is in an utterly different moral ballpark. It is an unconscionable act. It is an obscenity against the human family that makes Boris and Carrie’s 25-minute visit to a garden party look saintly in comparison.
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Ishapore No6 Jungle Carbine SMLE Prototype
Forgotten Weapons
Published 21 Nov 2018https://www.forgottenweapons.com/isha…
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In 1943, the British government began a program to develop a shortened and lightened version of the No1 SMLE rifle, for production in India and Australia — where the national ordnance factories had not converted to production of the No4 rifle. This prototype is the first pattern produced by the Ishapore Arsenal for testing. Its barrel is cut down to 16.5 inches (plus a 2.8 inch long conical flash hider), it has a unique 3-position flag style of rear aperture sight, and has had its sling swivels repositioned. This rifle was tested in the UK, and some modifications were recommended. A second pattern from Ishapore was then provisionally approved as the No6 MkI on September 1st, 1944, but cancelled before production could begin. The Australian pattern of No6 was approved a year late in September 1945, but then declared obsolete before it could be put into production. With the end of World War Two and Indian independence in 1947, the funding and impetus for a new short rifle were lost, and instead Ishapore would end up converting its production to No1 pattern rifles in 7.62mm NATO a few years later.
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January 17, 2022
HMS Victory – The Original Fast Battleship
Drachinifel
Published 3 Jul 2019Today we look at the world’s oldest commissioned warship, the first rate ship of the line HMS Victory.
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“We need to address the corrosive influence of behavioural science on public life”
Frank Furedi on the British government’s use (and over-use) of “nudge” polices to influence the behaviour of the British public:
“Palace of Westminster”by michaelhenley is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0
Behavioural science, aka “nudging”, has been used by the government during the pandemic to scare people into doing the “right” thing. This insidious development has even been acknowledged by Simon Ruda, one of the co-founders of the Behavioural Insights Team, aka the Nudge Unit, which is part-owned by the UK government. He wrote that the “most egregious and far-reaching mistake made in responding to the pandemic has been the level of fear willingly conveyed [to] the public”.
Though he said that the propagation of fear had more to do “with government communicators and the incentives of news broadcasters” than with behavioural scientists themselves, Ruda’s admission is still striking. He even expressed concern about the state’s willingness “to use its heft to influence our lives without the accountability of legislative and parliamentary scrutiny”.
Ruda is not the only behavioural scientist concerned about officialdom’s systematic scaremongering. On 22 March 2020, a paper written by the Scientific Pandemic Influenza Behaviour Advisory Committee (SPI-B) for the government’s Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE) complained that the public was too relaxed about the pandemic. “A substantial number of people still do not feel sufficiently personally threatened”, it stated, adding that too many “are reassured by the low death rate in their demographic group”. It then urged the government to increase “the perceived level of personal threat… among those who are complacent, using hard-hitting emotional messaging”.
Some members of SAGE have since reported feeling “embarrassed” by the nature of SPI-B’s advice. As one regular SAGE attendee put it last year: “The British people have been subjected to an unevaluated psychological experiment without being told that is what’s happening.”
It is to be welcomed that at least some behavioural scientists are now questioning the political use of their discipline. But the problem goes deeper than fear-mongering during the pandemic. We need to address the corrosive influence of behavioural science on public life in general.
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The shooting range where you fire over a busy road
Tom Scott
Published 18 Oct 2021The Brünnlisau shooting range in Switzerland has its targets on the other side of a major road. And it’s safe. Here’s how and why. Thanks to everyone at the Schiessanlage Brünnlisau!
Camera: Alicja Pahl
Producer: Sebastian Capeda at Viven https://viven.ch
Editor: Michelle Martin https://twitter.com/mrsmmartinI’m at https://tomscott.com
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QotD: The British ruling class reaction to fascism and communism
They could not struggle against Nazism or Fascism, because they could not understand them. Neither could they have struggled against Communism, if Communism had been a serious force in western Europe. To understand Fascism they would have had to study the theory of Socialism, which would have forced them to realize that the economic system by which they lived was unjust, inefficient and out of date. But it was exactly this fact that they had trained themselves never to face. They dealt with Fascism as the cavalry generals of 1914 dealt with the machine gun – by ignoring it. After years of aggression and massacres, they had grasped only one fact, that Hitler and Mussolini were hostile to Communism. Therefore, it was argued, they must be friendly to the British dividend-drawer. Hence the truly frightening spectacle of Conservative M.P.s wildly cheering the news that British ships, bringing food to the Spanish Republican government, had been bombed by Italian aeroplanes. Even when they had begun to grasp that Fascism was dangerous, its essentially revolutionary nature, the huge military effort it was capable of making, the sort of tactics it would use, were quite beyond their comprehension. At the time of the Spanish Civil War, anyone with as much political knowledge as can be acquired from a sixpenny pamphlet on Socialism knew that, if Franco won, the result would be strategically disastrous for England; and yet generals and admirals who had given their lives to the study of war were unable to grasp this fact. This vein of political ignorance runs right through English official life, through Cabinet ministers, ambassadors, consuls, judges, magistrates, policemen. The policeman who arrests the “Red” does not understand the theories the “Red” is preaching; if he did, his own position as bodyguard of the monied class might seem less pleasant to him. There is reason to think that even military espionage is hopelessly hampered by ignorance of the new economic doctrines and the ramifications of the underground parties.
The British ruling class were not altogether wrong in thinking that Fascism was on their side. It is a fact that any rich man, unless he is a Jew, has less to fear from Fascism than from either Communism or democratic Socialism. One ought never to forget this, for nearly the whole of German and Italian propaganda is designed to cover it up. The natural instinct of men like Simon, Hoare, Chamberlain, etc. was to come to an agreement with Hitler. But – and here the peculiar feature of English life that I have spoken of, the deep sense of national solidarity, comes in – they could only do so by breaking up the Empire and selling their own people into semi-slavery. A truly corrupt class would have done this without hesitation, as in France. But things had not gone that distance in England. Politicians who would make cringing speeches about “the duty of loyalty to our conquerors” are hardly to be found in English public life. Tossed to and fro between their incomes and their principles, it was impossible that men like Chamberlain should do anything but make the worst of both worlds.
One thing that has always shown that the English ruling class are morally fairly sound, is that in time of war they are ready enough to get themselves killed. Several dukes, earls and what-not were killed in the recent campaign in Flanders. That could not happen if these people were the cynical scoundrels that they are sometimes declared to be. It is important not to misunderstand their motives, or one cannot predict their actions. What is to be expected of them is not treachery or physical cowardice, but stupidity, unconscious sabotage, an infallible instinct for doing the wrong thing. They are not wicked, or not altogether wicked; they are merely unteachable. Only when their money and power are gone will the younger among them begin to grasp what century they are living in.
George Orwell, “The Lion And The Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius”, 1941-02-19.
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January 16, 2022
Food for Leningrad, Breaking the Siege! – WW2 – 177- January 15th, 1943
World War Two
Published 15 Jan 2022Soviet attacks are launched this week to destroy the Hungarians, all while the German desperation at Stalingrad and Velikie Luki continues, but in the far north the Soviets have broken through the siege of Leningrad after 16 months. And the Casablanca Conference begins, a meeting to guide the war’s future progress.
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The world’s most useful model railway
Tom Scott
Published 27 Sep 2021In Darmstadt, Germany, there’s the Eisenbahnbetriebsfeld: a model railway connected to actual railway signalling equipment, so that controllers can learn without putting any real trains in danger. I got to learn the very basics.
■ More about the railway (in German): https://www.eisenbahnbetriebsfeld.de/Camera: Moritz Janisch
Producer: Marcel Fenchel https://www.fenchel-janisch.de
Editor: Isla McTearWith thanks to Deutsche Bahn and DB Training, AKA Bahn, the Institut für Bahnsysteme und Bahntechnik at TU Darmstadt, and all the team at the Eisenbahnbetriebsfeld!
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QotD: Once “discovered”, colonization of the Americas was inevitable
This is not a joke. Political reality has a way of crashing in on the pipe dreams of liberal academics. The reality is, if the English had not colonised, then the French or the Dutch would have. If the Spanish had not colonised, the Portuguese would have. This would have shifted the balance of power at home, and any European country which had not colonised, would have been relegated to secondary status. And it is easy to overestimate the amount of control that European governments actually had. As soon as the New World was discovered, many fisherman and traders sailed across the Atlantic on their own, in hopes of circumventing tax authorities and scoring a fortune. Long before colonies were established in most regions, the New World was crawling with Europeans whose superior technology gave them an edge in combat. Nonetheless, it was extremely dangerous for Europeans to provoke fights with Native Americans, and most of them tried to avoid this when possible. In retrospect, one could in theory be impressed that so many European governments showed a genuine concern to rein in the worst excesses of their subjects, with an express eye to protecting the Indians from depredation. The logic was simple: they attempted to protect their subjects at home, in order to secure good order and a better tax base. So they would do the same to their subjects in the New World. For a long time, few Europeans harboured any master plan of pushing the Native Americans out of their own lands. In more densely populated regions such as Mexico, such an idea must have seemed an absurdity. Reality tends to occur ad hoc. Boundaries often took generations to move, and would have seemed fixed at the time. For several centuries, many Europeans assumed that they would long be a minority on the North American continent. In Mexico and Peru, they always have been.
Population density mattered, a lot, when it came to pre-modern global migrations. China and India were “safe” from excessive European colonisation because they had the densest populations in the world, and they were likewise largely immune to any diseases brought by Europeans. SubSaharan Africa had a lower population density depleted by slave raiding, but they still outnumbered European colonists by a large margin throughout the colonial era — again because European contact did not decimate their numbers through disease the way it did in the Americas. It is worth noting that no one claims that Europeans committed genocide in India, Asia or even Africa, although their technological advantages gave them every opportunity had they actually been of a genocidal mindset (as were for example the Mongols). In fact, the European track record shows them to be almost shockingly un-genocidal, given their clear technological advantages over the rest of the world for a period of several centuries. Few other civilisations, given similar power over so much of the world’s people, would have behaved in a less reprehensible manner. This is not to give Europeans a pat on the back. Rather it is to point out that Europeans are regularly painted as the very worst society on Earth, when in fact they had the power to do far, far more evil than they actually did. Let us at least acknowledge this fact.
Jeff Fynn-Paul, “The myth of the ‘stolen century'”, Spectator Magazine, 2020-09-26.
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January 15, 2022
Constantinople: The Capital of Eastern Rome
Thersites the Historian
Published 13 May 2020In this video, we look at the new capital city of the Eastern Roman Empire built by Constantine. We start out by briefly exploring the history of the Megarian colony of Byzantion and also how the city was patronized by the emperor Septimius Severus before looking at the late antique origins and medieval history of Constantinople.
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Merely to be accused of transphobia is enough proof for condemnation
Jean Hatchet on the plight of Staffordshire University professor James Treadwell, who has been anonymously accused of “transphobia” … and therefore must be punished:
Yesterday evening Professor James Treadwell, a criminologist at Staffordshire University, announced his dismay on Twitter at being accused of “transphobia”. The details are vague, even to him. He has not been presented with evidence and he doesn’t and may never know who has accused him.
He wrote: “Ok to hell with it. I have been told by my employer @StaffsUni albeit only verbally that I am being investigated for Transphobia after formal and official complaints about my Twitter conduct. Read my tweets. Go figure.”
Go figure indeed. It is completely baffling. The issue is Professor Treadwell’s tweeting in favour of the right of female inmates to a single-sex prison estate. In a series of tweets on 27 December 2021, Professor Treadwell outlined his experience of the manipulative behaviour of violent sex offenders who will use loopholes to “game” the criminal justice system. He was clear that his tweets were not directed at the transgender community. He wrote:
“The idea that sex offenders are manipulative individuals who would exploit systems and laws could only be unreal to those who do not know how manipulative sexual offenders can be. All groom, seek to exploit and control.”
And he made very clear that his tweets weren’t attacking the transgender community:
“It isn’t about trans people, it’s about bad people who will exploit the law from self interest and work within a legal framework (that could protect women’s spaces) to do as they want and get what they want. You think that won’t happen, you don’t know how many sex offenders act.”
Who would be better placed to discuss this issue than a leading criminologist who has worked with some of the worst sex offenders in the country? The polite and well-informed tweets hit the nerve of public opinion on the topic of trans-identified men incarcerated in the female prison estate and were widely, mostly supportively, distributed.
Today, Professor Treadwell is in the awful position of fearing for his job; for a few tweets about a subject that he is specifically qualified to speak on. Meanwhile an effective message is simultaneously sent to his academic colleagues nationwide, that they could be targeted next. He is not the first and he won’t be the last. Many criminologists are choosing to look the other way. Professor Treadwell felt that he could no longer do so. His professional integrity appears to be exactly what he is being persecuted for.
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QotD: “Jack Ketch as Eugenist”
The murder rate is very low in England, perhaps the lowest in the world. It is low because nearly all the potential ancestors of murderers were hanged or exiled in the Eighteenth Century. Why is it so high in the United States? Because most of the potential ancestors of murderers, in the late Eighteenth and early Nineteenth Centuries were not hanged. And why did they escape? For two plain reasons. First, the existing government was too weak to track them down and execute them, especially in the West. Second, the qualities of daring and enterprise that went with their murderousness were so valuable that it was socially profitable to overlook their homicides. In other words the job of occupying and organizing the vast domain of the new Republic was one that demanded the aid of men who, among other things, occasionally butchered their fellow men. The butchering had to be winked at in order to get their help. Thus the murder rate, on the frontier, rose to unprecedented heights, while the execution rate remained very low. Probably 100,000 men altogether were murdered in the territory west of the Ohio between 1776 and 1865; probably not 100 murderers were formally executed. When they were punished at all, it was by other murderers — and this left the strain unimpaired.
H.L. Mencken, “Miscellaneous Notes: Jack Ketch as Eugenist”, Prejudices: Fifth Series, 1926.
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January 14, 2022
Decision At The Burgundian Gate – The Battle of Belfort Gap
Real Time History
Published 13 Jan 2022Support us on Patreon: https://patreon.com/realtimehistory
In minus 20 degrees the ragtag French Armée L’Est still tries to relieve Belfort — which is under siege by the Baden Corps under General von Werder. Belfort’s resistance against the siege is later immortalized in the Lion of Belfort.
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https://realtimehistory.net/podcast – interviews with historians and background info for the show.» LITERATURE
Arand, Tobias: 1870/71. Der Deutsch-Französische Krieg erzählt in Einzelschicksalen. Hamburg 2018Barry, Quintin: The Franco-Prussian War 1870-71. Vol 2 After Sedan. Solihull, 2007
Bartmann, Dominik (Hrsg.): Ausst.-Kat DHM Berlin‚ Anton von Werner. Geschichte in Bildern. München 1993
Bauer, Gerhard u.a. (Hrsg.): Ausst.-Kat. MHM Dresden‚ Krieg – Macht – Nation. Wie das deutsche Kaiserreich entstand. Dresden 2020
Howard, Michael: The Franco-Prussian War. London, 1961
Mény, Edouard: Le siège de Belfort 1870-71. 2013
Robichon, François: Alphonse de Neuville 1835-1885, Paris 2010
» SOURCES
Bernardt, Sarah: Ma double vie. Mémoires. Paris 1907Fontane, Theodor: Der Krieg gegen Frankreich. Bd. 4. Berlin 1876
Goncourt, Edmond de: Journal des Goncourts. II.1. 1870-1871. Paris 1890
Seigneur, Daniel: Carnets d’un infirmier d’une guerre oubliée. De la Savoie à la Franche-Comté. Divonnes-les-bains 2014
Werner, Anton von: Erlebnisse und Eindrücke 1870-1890. Berlin 1913
Zeitz, Karl: Kriegserinnerungen eines Feldzugsfreiwilligen aus den Jahren 1870 und 1871. Altenburg 1905
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People who tell “noble lies” are still liars who should not be trusted
In Spiked, Matt Ridley considers why so many scientists went along with the disinformation campaign to obscure or discredit the lab-leak theory on the origins of the Wuhan Coronavirus:
Wuhan Institute of Virology.
Wikimedia Commons.
In August 2007 there was an outbreak of foot-and-mouth virus on a farm in Surrey. It was a few miles from the world’s leading reference laboratory for identifying outbreaks of foot and mouth. Nobody thought this was a coincidence and sure enough a leaking pipe at the laboratory was soon found to be the source: a drainage contractor had worked at the lab and then at the farm.
In December 2019 there was an outbreak in China of a novel bat-borne SARS-like coronavirus a few miles from the world’s leading laboratory for collecting, studying and manipulating novel bat-borne SARS-like coronaviruses. We were assured by leading scientists in China, the US and the UK that this really was a coincidence, even when the nine closest relatives of the new virus turned up in the freezer of the laboratory in question, at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.Now we know what those leading scientists really thought. Emails exchanged between them after a conference call on 1 February 2020, and only now forced into the public domain by Republicans in the US Congress, show that they not only thought the virus might have leaked from a lab, but they also went much further in private. They thought the genome sequence of the new virus showed a strong likelihood of having been deliberately manipulated or accidentally mutated in the lab. Yet later they drafted an article for a scientific journal arguing that the suggestion not just of a manipulated virus, but even of an accidental spill, could be confidently dismissed and was a crackpot conspiracy theory.
Jeremy Farrar – who organised the call on 1 February with Patrick Vallance, Francis Collins, Anthony Fauci and a Who’s Who of virology – had already spilled a few of the beans in his book, Spike, published last year. He wrote that at the start of February 2020 he thought there was a 50 per cent chance the virus was engineered, while Kristian Andersen of the Scripps Research Institute was at 60-70 per cent and Eddie Holmes of Sydney University put it at 80 per cent. But some time after the call they all changed their mind. Why? They have never troubled us with an answer.
Now, however, we have an email from Farrar, sent on Sunday 2 February to Francis Collins, head of the National Institutes of Health, and Anthony Fauci, head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. It recounts the overnight thoughts of two other virologists Farrar had consulted, Robert Garry of Tulane University and Michael Farzan of the Scripps Research Institute, as well as Farrar’s own thoughts. Even after the call, their concern centred on a feature of the SARS-CoV-2 genome that had never been seen in any other SARS-like coronavirus before: the insertion (compared with the closest related virus in bats) of a 12-letter genetic sequence that creates a thing called a furin cleavage site, which makes the virus much more infectious.
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