The Tank Museum
Published 13 Jun 2025The A39 Tortoise. The last complete survivor of a World War Two project that arrived just a little too late. Some have called it “The British Jagdtiger” – but is that actually a fair comparison?
Tortoise was a part of the strategy the Allies would need to defeat Germany during the Second World War. It was recognised that total victory could only occur on German soil – and that meant smashing through the imposing defences of the Siegfried Line. The Allies would need a Heavy Assault tank. Many designs were put forward for this role, including the Valiant, the A33 and the T14 Assault tank.
The A39 is extremely well-armoured. Its casemate construction could withstand a hit from an 88mm gun at close ranges. But at 78-tons, this lumbering beast was both slow and heavy – and is one of the largest and heaviest vehicles in the museum’s collection. In terms of firepower, the impressive 32pdr gun was extremely effective against both concrete and enemy armour. It even has room inside for 7 crew!
In the end, the Tortoise arrived too late to see any action on the battlefield. It was intended to form a part of the 79th Armoured Division – making it one of Hobart’s Funnies. Whether Tortoise would have become the stuff of legend, or a bit of a joke – well, we’ll leave that question up to you.
00:00 | Introduction
00:39 | What is a Heavy Assault Tank?
03:45 | Why a Heavy Assault Tank?
09:24 | The A39: As Good as it Gets?
17:55 | A Solution Without a Problem
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October 23, 2025
A39 Tortoise: The Forgotten Super Heavy
QotD: The importance of ancestor veneration to pre-Christian cultures
John: The claim that the fundamental religion of the Greco-Roman world was ancestor veneration, and that everything else was incidental to or derivative from that, is so interesting. I’m not conversant enough with the ancient sources to know whether Fustel de Coulanges is overstating this part, but if you imagine that he’s correct, a lot of other things click into place. For instance, he does a good job showing why it leads pretty quickly to extreme patrilineality, much as it did in the one society that arguably placed even more of an emphasis on ancestor veneration — Ancient China.
And like in China, what develops out of this is an entire domestic religion, or rather a million distinct domestic religions, each with its own secret rites. In China there were numerous attempts over the millennia to standardize a notion of “correct ritual”, none of which really succeeded, until the one-two punch of communism and capitalism swept away that entire cultural universe. But for thousands of years, every family (defined as a male lineage) maintained its own doctrine, its own historical records, its own gods and hymns and holy sites. It’s this fact that makes marriage so momentous. The book has a wonderfully romantic passage about this:
Two families live side by side; but they have different gods. In one, a young daughter takes a part, from her infancy, in the religion of her father; she invokes his sacred fire; every day she offers it libations. She surrounds it with flowers and garlands on festal days. She asks its protection, and returns thanks for its favors. This paternal fire is her god. Let a young man of the neighboring family ask her in marriage, and something more is at stake than to pass from one house to the other.
She must abandon the paternal fire, and henceforth invoke that of the husband. She must abandon her religion, practice other rites, and pronounce other prayers. She must give up the god of her infancy, and put herself under the protection of a god whom she knows not. Let her not hope to remain faithful to the one while honoring the other; for in this religion it is an immutable principle that the same person cannot invoke two sacred fires or two series of ancestors. “From the hour of marriage,” says one of the ancients, “the wife has no longer anything in common with the religion of her fathers; she sacrifices at the hearth of her husband.”
Marriage is, therefore, a grave step for the young girl, and not less grave for the husband; for this religion requires that one shall have been born near the sacred fire, in order to have the right to sacrifice to it. And yet he is now about to bring a stranger to this hearth; with her he will perform the mysterious ceremonies of his worship; he will reveal the rites and formulas which are the patrimony of his family. There is nothing more precious than this heritage; these gods, these rites, these hymns which he has received from his fathers, are what protect him in this life, and promise him riches, happiness, and virtue. And yet, instead of keeping to himself this tutelary power, as the savage keeps his idol or his amulet, he is going to admit a woman to share it with him.
Naturally this reminded me of the Serbs. Whereas most practitioners of traditional Christianity have individual patron saints, Serbs de-emphasize this and instead have shared patrons for their entire “clan” (defined as a male lineage). Instead of the name day celebrations common across Eastern Europe, they instead have an annual slava, a religious feast commemorating the family patron, shared by the entire male lineage. Only men may perform the ritual of the slava, unmarried women share in the slava of their father. Upon marriage, a woman loses the heavenly patronage of her father’s clan, and adopts that of her husband, and henceforward participates in their rituals instead. It’s … eerily similar to the story Fustel de Coulanges tells. Can this really be a coincidence, or have the Serbs managed to hold onto an ancient proto-Indo-European practice?1 I tend towards the latter explanation, since that would be the most Serbian thing ever.
But I’m more interested in what all this means for us today, because with the exception of maybe a few aristocratic families, this highly self-conscious effort to build familial culture and maintain familial distinctiveness is almost totally absent in the Western world. But it’s not that hard! I said before that the patrilineal domestic worship of ancient China was annihilated in the 20th century, but perhaps that isn’t quite as true as it might at first appear. I know plenty of Chinese people with the ability to return to their ancestral village and consult a book that records the names and deeds of their male-lineage ancestors going back thousands of years. These aren’t aristocrats,2 these are normal people, because this is just what normal people do. And I also know Chinese people named according to generation poems written centuries ago, which is a level of connection with and submission to the authority of one’s ancestors that seems completely at odds with the otherwise quite deracinated and atomized nature of contemporary Chinese society.
Perhaps this is why I have an instinctive negative reaction when I encounter married couples who don’t share a name. I don’t much care whether it’s the wife who takes the husband’s name or the husband who takes the wife’s, or even both of them switching to something they just made up (yeah, I’m a lib).3 But it just seems obvious to me on a pre-rational level that a husband and a wife are a team of secret agents, a conspiracy of two against the world, the cofounders of a tiny nation, the leaders of an insurrection. Members of secret societies need codenames and special handshakes and passwords and stuff, keeping separate names feels like the opposite — a timorous refusal to go all-in.
And yet, literally the entire architecture of modern culture and society4 is designed to brainwash us into valuing our individual “autonomy” too much to discover the joy that comes from pushing all your chips into the pot. Is there any hope of being able to swim upstream on this one? What tricks can we steal from weak-chinned Habsburgs and the Chinese urban bourgeoisie?
Jane: I have a friend whose great-grandmother was one of four sisters, and to this day their descendants (five generations’ worth by now!) get together every year for a reunion with scavenger hunts and other competitions color-coded by which branch they’re from. Ever since I heard this story, one of my goals as a mother has been to make the kind of family where my grandchildren’s grandchildren will actually know each other, so I’ve thought a lot about how to do that.
On an individual level, you can get pretty far just by caring. People — children especially, but people more generally — long to know who they are and where they came from. In a world where they don’t get much of that, it doesn’t take many stories about family history and trips “home” to inculcate a sense a “fromness”: some place, some people.5 Our kids have this, I think, and it’s almost entirely a function of (1) their one great-grandparent who really cared and (2) the ancestral village of that branch of the family, which they’ve grown up visiting every year. Nothing builds familial distinctiveness like praying at the graves of your ancestors! But that doesn’t scale, because we’re a Nation of Immigrants(TM) and we mostly don’t have ancestral villages. (The closest I get is Brooklyn, a borough I have never even visited.) And even for the fraction of Americans whose ancestors were here before 1790 (or 1850, or whatever point you choose as the moment just before urbanization and technological innovation began to really dislocate us), the connection to people and place grows yearly more strained.
For the highly mobile professional-managerial class, moving for that new job, it’s even worse. You and I live where we live not because we like it particularly, or because we have roots here, but because it’s what made sense for work. And though we sometimes idly talk about moving somewhere with better weather and more landscape (not even a prettier landscape, just, you know, more), I don’t think any of the places we’d consider have a sufficiently diverse economic base that I’d bet on them being able to support four households worth of our children and grandchildren. We often think of living in your hometown in order to stay connected to your family as a sacrifice that children make — hanging out a shingle in the third largest town in Nebraska rather than heading to New York for Biglaw or something like that — but I increasingly see giving your children a hometown they can reasonably stay in as a sacrifice that we can make as parents.
Fustel de Coulanges has this beautiful, poetic passage about the relationship between the individual and the family:
To form an idea of inheritance among the ancients, we must not figure to ourselves a fortune which passes from the hands of one to those of another. The fortune is immovable, like the hearth, and the tomb to which it is attached. It is the man who passes away. It is the man who, as the family unrolls its generations, arrives at his house appointed to continue the worship, and to take care of the domain.
I love this as a metaphor. It’s generational thinking on steroids: it’s not just “plant trees for your grandchildren to enjoy”, it’s “don’t sell the timberland to pay your bills because it’s your grandchildren’s patrimony”. And there’s something to it, especially when the woods are inherited, because it’s your duty to pass along what was passed down to you. You should be bound by the past, you should be part of something greater than yourself, because the “authentic you” is an incoherent half-formed ball of mutually contradictory desires and lizard-brain instinct. It’s the job of your family and your culture (but I repeat myself) to mold “you” into something real, like the medieval bestiaries though mother bears did to their cubs. But take it literally, as Fustel de Coulanges insists the ancients did, and it feels too much like playing Crusader Kings for me to be entirely comfortable. Yeah, this time my player heir is lazy and gluttonous, but his son looks like he’s shaping up okay, maybe we’ll go after Mecklenburg in thirty years or so. The actual individual is basically incidental to the process. And the entire ancient city is built of this!
The book describes how several families (and it’s worth noting that this includes their slaves and clients; the family here is the gens, which only aristocrats have) come together to form a φρᾱτρῐ́ᾱ or curia, modeled exactly after the family worship with a heroic ancestor, sacred hearth, and cult festivals. Then later several phratries form a tribe, again with a god and rites and patterns of initiation, and then the tribes found a city, each nested intact within the next level up, so that the city isn’t just a conglomeration of people living in the same place, it’s a cult of initiates who are called citizens. And, as in the family, the individual is really only notable as the part of this vast diachronic entity that’s currently capable of walking around and performing the rites. The ancient citizen is the complete opposite of the autonomous, actualized agent our society valorizes, which makes it a useful corrective to our excesses. That image of the family unrolling, of the living man as the one tiny part that’s presently above ground, is something we deracinated moderns would do well to guard in our hearts. But that doesn’t make it true.
Almost by accident, in showing us what inheritance and family meant for the ancient world, Fustel de Coulanges illustrates why Christianity is such a revolutionary doctrine. For the ancients, the son and heir is the one who will next hold the priesthood in the cult of his sacred ancestor. In Christ, we are each adopted into sonship, each made the heir of the Creator of all things, “no more a servant, but a son; and if a son, then an heir of God through Christ”.
Jane and John Psmith, “JOINT REVIEW: The Ancient City, by Numa Denis Fustel de Coulanges”, Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf, 2023-02-20.
- Speaking of ancient proto-Indo-European practices, his descriptions of the earliest Greek and Roman marriage ceremonies are also fascinating. They incorporate a stylized version of something very reminiscent of Central Asian bride kidnapping! I like to think this is also a holdover of some unfathomably old custom, rather than convergent evolution.
- IMO China never really regained a true aristocracy after Mongol rule and the upheavals preceding the establishment of the Ming dynasty.
- The trouble with hyphenation is, what do you do the following generation? I know people are bad at thinking about the future, but come on, you just have to imagine this happening one more time. In fact, the brutally patrilineal Greeks and Romans and Chinese were more advanced than us in recognizing a simple truth about exponential growth. Your ancestors grow like 2^N, which means their contribution gets diluted like 1/(2^N), unless you pick an arbitrary rule and stick with it.
- With the exception of the Crazy Rich Asians movie. Maybe the Chinese taking over Hollywood will slowly purge the toxins from our society. Lol. Lmao.
- Sometimes, as with the Habsburgs, it becomes cringe.
October 22, 2025
H&K MG4: Germany’s New 5.56mm Squad Machine Gun
Forgotten Weapons
Published 7 Jun 2025Heckler & Koch released the MG4, a new 5.56mm squad machine gun in 2001. It was adopted by the German army in 2005, and then by the Spanish and Portuguese armies in 2007. Alongside its sister weapon the 7.62mm MG5, it is H&K’s current export machine gun.
The MG4 fires from an open bolt, with a 2-lug rotating bolt locking system and a long stroke gas piston operating system. It uses standard M27 NATO links for feeding, and does not have a semiauto selector setting. Mechanically, the MG4 uses a front trunnion into which both the barrel and bolt lock independently — meaning that the quick-change barrel can be removed with the bolt in either the forward or rearward position.
As one would expect for a 5.56mm machine gun weighing 18 pounds, it is very easy to control.
Thanks to Sellier & Bellot for giving me access to this modern machine gun to film for you!
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QotD: The supposed land crisis Tiberius Gracchus wanted to solve
What they assume is taking place is that the wealthiest Romans – who have, in fact, grown fantastically wealthy from Rome’s overseas wars – have used that wealth to acquire most of the land, either buying up the small freeholds of smaller Roman farmers or getting the leases for that public land. Meanwhile, the Roman small farmer class does most of Rome’s fighting and so the assumption – by Appian – is that these guys are being ground underfoot by heavy military deployments, although as best we can tell, military deployments in the 150s, 140s and 130s are substantially lighter than those from 218-168 (but they’re also in less profitable, more difficult places like Spain, put a pin in that). Those wealthy Romans then work the land not with free laborers, but with slaves, because Roman conquests – remember, we’re at the tail end of Rome’s “iron century” of conquests from 264 to 148 – have brought enormous numbers of enslaved laborers to Italy. Those poor Romans, now displaced, have no land and flock to Rome and are no longer liable for the Roman census.
Except notice the data points being used to come up with this story: the visible population of landless men in Rome and the Roman census returns. But, as we’ve discussed, the Roman census is self-reported, and the report of a bit of wealth like a small farm is what makes an individual liable for taxes and conscription.
In short the story we have above is an interpretation of the available data but not the only one and both our sources and Tiberius Gracchus simply lack the tools necessary to gather the information they’d need to sound out if their interpretation is correct.
All of which now, at last, brings us to the scholarship of the last several decades which has, by and large, concluded that Tiberius Gracchus probably misunderstood the nature of Roman social and economic problems in the late second century and as a result applied the wrong solution.2 The initial problem is that the above model assumes a basically stagnant Italian population: you’re just shifting people around, not generating new people. But survey archaeology shows growing urban centers and new land coming under cultivation, suggesting a modestly rising population, a conclusion reinforced by demographic modeling which recognizes the likely marked decline in military mortality in the back half of the second century. Moreover, the vast expansion of villa estates we ought to be seeing in this period really only comes later, in the first century BC and the first two centuries AD; there’s some expansion (and these patterns are very regionalized) but not enough to explain what we’re being told is happening.3 Those observations, emerging in the 90s and early 2000s, provided the necessary evidence to vindicate the theory advanced by J.W. Rich in the 1980s that the problem was quite different than Tiberius Gracchus understood, in part to explain the one curious fact we could always see about Tiberius’ land reforms, which is that they happened, they went ahead as planned and also they didn’t fix the problem.
Instead what is happening is this: Roman military deployments had, for a long time, been massive. Rome had careened from the major Samnite Wars (343–341, 326–304, and 298–290) to the high-casualty Pyrrhic War (280-275) to the much higher casualty First (264-241) and Second (218-201) Punic Wars. But the big wars of the early second century had involved a lot more winning and thus somewhat less dying (deaths from disease always outweighed combat losses, but Roman armies are smaller from 201-168, so less disease death too), while after the Third Macedonian War (171-168), Rome doesn’t have any more peer-opponent wars left to fight and so the number of men under arms declines again after 168 and especially after 148. Roman society was thus structured to sustain itself in a situation where military mortality for males was high. And then it dropped.
But recall the average Roman farm is small, so what you have now are suddenly a whole bunch of second and third sons who between 350 and 201 would have gone off to fight and died (or their elder brother would have) but are now alive, but can’t possibly inherit the family farm because they have a living brother and the farm is much too small to split further (or to support an entire second nuclear family unit). Where do they go? Well, to Rome, of course, where they want what Rome has done in the past to deal with this sort of problem: the foundation of new Roman communities (colonies) where they can have land. But there isn’t any Italy left to conquer (Rome controls all of it) and we aren’t yet to founding Roman colonies overseas, so not only is the mortality much lower (and so you have more of these guys) the traditional release valve is stuck. So they’re piling up in the one place that there is meaningful amount of wage labor available (the city of Rome), where they are very visible to the Roman ruling elite.
Meanwhile, Elder Brother-Who-Lived is back on the farm and should, in theory, still be eligible for call-up. But whereas in previous decades he could hope to get sent to fight in places like Greece or Italy or against Carthage where the rewards in loot from defeating wealthy enemies were substantial, in the 130s, the main problem was Numantia: a Celtiberian community perched in a particularly troublesome hillfort in a relatively poor, difficult part of Spain. Campaigns to take the place often failed (see above) but even if they succeeded, there would be little real loot. Moreover, a lack of success made the wars deeply unpopular. Elder Brother doesn’t want to get drafted to go fight in Spain, it’s just not a good bargain for him (unlike earlier wars).
But he has a solution: the census is self-reported. While his younger brothers are in Rome looking for work, he can just not report the farm on the census (or not report his military aged son), understating his wealth to drop below the qualifying requirement for military service. Because the Roman census pays functionally no attention to such men – the capite censi (those counted by their heads) – Elder Brother’s household almost seems to vanish in the census returns and the number of men liable for conscription ticks down by one.
And so you have falling census returns, combined with crowds of poor Romans in the city of Rome, but without it necessarily having anything to do with ager publicus or lost farms. And this is, we think, probably what is happening: surely there is some elite villa-estate expansion and some replacement of freeholding farmers with enslaved workers on that land but in fact the problem the Romans are facing is classic land scarcity with a growing population, but they don’t know that’s the problem because draft-resistance appears in the census as population decline and the census is all they have.
But you can see immediately the problem for Tiberius Gracchus’ land reform: while there is certainly some ager publicus to redistribute (to the great annoyance of the elites holding it), there’s not enough, because the core of this problem isn’t changing land use patterns (more villas, less small farms) but rising population creating economic strain at the bottom (while, it is true, imperial expansion creates vast almost unimaginable amounts of wealth at the top).
But we’re actually not quite done with problems, there’s one more: not all of the ager publicus was being farmed by Romans. Quite a lot of it seems, instead, to have been in the hands of local Italians – the socii. This is another convenient simplification by Appian and Plutarch, a product of them both writing in the imperial period long after citizenship had been extended across Italy. But that hasn’t happened yet. So any law to redistribute ager publicus would mean taking land from the socii who were currently using it for a land-giveaway in which only Roman citizens will be eligible.
You may well imagine that doing something like that might really damage relations with the socii and also fundamentally change the “bargain” by which the Roman alliance system functioned, as before Tiberius Gracchus, the socii seem to have been eligible to settle in Roman colonial foundations on conquered land, but they will not be eligible to get land in Tiberius Gracchus’ land reform bill.
You can quickly flip ahead to the year 91 to see how that turns out in the long run.
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: On the Gracchi, Part I: Tiberius Gracchus”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2025-01-17.
- To pause for a second: for the sake of making this understandable, I am using the relatively simple category of ager publicus. However, as Gargola (op. cit.) notes, in actual Roman law, ager publicus was a messy super-category of lands governed by an exciting range of different rules and conditions (some leased, some sold, some held by the state, etc.) – ager censorius, ager quaestorius, ager occupatorius, ager diuisus et adsignatus, the ager Campanus and ager in trientabulis. Simplifying this and treating all of these lands as if they had been governed under the same rubric which Tiberius is merely now enforcing is one of Appian’s deceptive simplifications.
- For the scholarship, this reaction begins with J.W. Rich, “The Supposed Roman Manpower Shortage of the Later Second Century B.C.” Historia 32 (1983). The next major phase comes out of the high-count/low-count population debates around Roman demography because older demographic models, like those of PA Brunt (Italian Manpower (1971)) had assumed a static Roman population, but as noted we increasingly had evidence for a modestly increasing population. The implications of that get worked out in books like N. Rosenstein, Rome at War: Farms, Families and Death in the Middle Republic (2004) and L. De Ligt, Peasants, Citizens and Soldiers (2012). Finally, you also have a recognition that while the wars in Spain were unpopular, they didn’t have massive manpower demands, e.g. Taylor, “Goodbye to All That: The Roman Citizen Militia After the Great Wars” in A Community in Transition, eds. M. Balbo and F. Santangelo (2023).
- In Italy, I should be clear: the pervasiveness and speed with which rich Romans seem to accumulate Sicilian estates suggests a lot of the land acquisition may be happening outside of the ager Romanus.
October 21, 2025
Everyone benefits from Germany’s political “firewall” except the people that created it
Checking in with eugyppius on the situation in Germany, where the centre-right parties apparently feel they have no enemies to the left, as they maintain the “firewall” against the populist Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), and the beneficiaries are … the left and the AfD:
The brings me to the crazy and ridiculous firewall against the AfD – the unending Antifa-enforced political tabu upon achieving anything with AfD votes at the state or federal level. AfD support is held to be contaminating, regardless of whatever it is the AfD happen to be supporting. It can turn even the most ordinary routine legislation into dark evil malicious fascism.
The firewall against the AfD splits the right and so it is a great gift to the left. For example, it’s the only reason the SPD has a say in the federal government after their disastrous showing in the traffic light coalition. It’s the only reason the left is still a force in East Germany outside Brandenburg at all. Should we get new elections, the firewall will probably bring the Greens into government too. If it didn’t exist, the left would have to invent it, that is how well the firewall is working out for them.
The AfD also benefits enormously from the firewall, even though it’s not of their making. The last ten years of German politics have been one unending nightmarish festival of failure and stupidity. All the establishment parties have taken turns implicating themselves in this amazing shitshow, while religiously sparing the AfD any association with their unprecedented failures. The firewall lends truth to the AfD‘s name; it has allowed Alternative für Deutschland to become the only conceivable political alternative in Germany. As things get worse and voters grow more desperate for alternatives, the AfD just becomes stronger. The firewall is an AfD-maximising machine.
The firewall is only really bad for the people who invented it and who alone have the power to end it. I speak here of the centre-right Union parties, the CDU and the CSU. They maintain the firewall not because it helps them or because it is a good idea or even because the AfD are evil fascists, but because the firewall has been endified [become an end in itself].
In 2018, when the CDU first set up the firewall, it had a coherent purpose. It was supposed to be a means of keeping the AfD small by dissuading CDU supporters from defecting to their upstart rival. CDU leadership had seen how the rising Green Party ate into the support of the SPD after reunification, and they thought they could prevent the same thing from happening to them. They would have been better off doing nothing at all, because after seven years of firewall the AfD are stronger than the Greens ever were. The whole thing has become a lesson in why you should avoid heavy-handed interventions in complex systems and just govern pragmatically with whatever majorities are at hand.
Let us survey the damage: The firewall has helped the AfD supplant the CDU as the standard right-of-centre party across the entire East. In Mecklenburg-Vorpommern and Sachsen-Anhalt, the Evil Hitler Fascists are within striking distance of outright majorities. Ballooning AfD popularity is fuelled by the failures of Merz’s federal government, where the firewall has locked the Union into a doomed coalition with the radicalised and hostile Social Democrats. The SPD have so far obstructed all major federal initiatives, probably for the purpose of hurting the CDU still further and driving them into the arms of the AfD. It is a strategy the left first tried during the federal election campaign, and one they have so far refused to abandon.
Various preeminent Union personalities, eager to stop the destruction of their party, have demanded a change in course. These firewall-rethinkers include former CDU General Secretary Peter Tauber – the very man who played a leading role in devising the firewall strategy in the first place. Shortly after Stern published Tauber’s mild and very careful dissent, a series of CDU politicians from East Germany lined up to say that they, too, would desperately like to see a new approach to the AfD. As I type this, CDU leadership have withdrawn for a highly secret meeting to discuss this dilemma and how they will deal with the AfD in the future.
Alas, endification is a powerful force. You can’t just turn it off. Chancellor Friedrich Merz, whose political instincts rival those of most earthworms, has used the days and hours ahead of this meeting to sing the praises of the firewall. In response to a journalist’s question last Tuesday, Merz intoned absurdly and for no reason at all that “We are the firewall!” And yesterday, at some political event in Sauerland, he ruled out cooperation with the AfD in any form – “at least not under me as party leader of the CDU“. Merz further claimed that “there is no common ground between the CDU and the AfD” and complained that AfD opposition to the European Union, NATO and the European Monetary Union means that the party “is against everything that has made the Federal Republic of Germany great and strong over the past eight decades”.
At this stage, I suspect a lot of German voters would like to respond to Merz’s “not under me as party leader of the CDU” by doing the meme:
October 20, 2025
From Hitler’s Rockets to America’s Arsenal – W2W 049
TimeGhost History
Published 19 Oct 2025From the ashes of Nazi Germany to the launch pads of the American desert, the story of the nation’s first ballistic missile is one filled with contradiction. A man who once served the SS soon became a celebrated figure in the United States, and his weapon of war was transformed into a symbol of progress. Here, we will explore how this unlikely journey unfolded and what it reveals about science, power, and morality in the modern age.
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The Julio-Claudians and the Empire – The Conquered and the Proud 16
Adrian Goldsworthy. Historian and Novelist
Published 2 Apr 2025This time we look at the empire under the Julio-Claudians, and address the broader question of why conquest became so rare after the death of Augustus. Along the way, we take a look at the campaigns in Germany in AD 14-16, the subsequent arrangements of the Rhine frontier, and Corbulo’s campaign during Claudius’ reign. We touch a little on the invasion of Britain, but will deal with that in more detail in a separate video. Other topics covered include North Africa, Egypt, and the relationship with the Parthian Empire to the east.
October 19, 2025
Reframing the loss of elite legitimacy as a “loss of faith in democracy”
On his Substack, Frank Furedi illustrates how the public’s declining trust in political elites across the western world is being reframed in the legacy media as declining faith in democracy itself:
No doubt you have come across commentators and legacy politicians whining about the public’s loss of trust in democracy and in the key institutions of society.
“France is not alone in its crisis of political faith – belief in a democratic world is vanishing” commented Simon Tisdall last week in The Guardian.1 He noted that “belief that democracy is the form of governance best suited to the modern world is dwindling, especially among younger people“.
The tendentious claim that the current era of political malaise is an outcome of a loss of commitment to democracy is regularly echoed by mainstream commentators. This was the message of a recent Politico headline that stated that “Europe’s democracies are in danger, warn Merz and Macron”.2 It cited the German Chancellor Friedrich Merz stating that these “threats dwarf anything seen since the Cold War”. He noted that “the radiance of what we in the West call liberal democracy is noticeably diminishing”, adding: “it is no longer a given that the world will orient itself towards us, that it will follow our values of liberal democracy”.
If anything, the French President Macron was even more pessimistic than Merz. He warns that Europe is undergoing a “degeneration of democracy due to attacks from without and from within”. He was particularly concerned about the loss of faith in democracy within France. “On the inside we are turning on ourselves; we doubt our own democracy”, he noted, before adding, “we see everywhere that something is happening to our democratic fabric. Democratic debate is turning into a debate of hatred.” This statement coming from a man, whose presidency lacks a genuine mandate and relies on bureaucratic maneuvering exposes the cynicism of his concern for the “degeneration of democracy”.
[…]
Loss of elite authority
In reality the crisis of democracy narrative serves to mystify the real issues at stake. This narrative offers a misdiagnosis of the very real loss of legitimacy of the ruling elites as a loss of belief in democracy. As far as this dominant narrative is concerned every time people vote against the representatives of the legacy political establishment democracy is in trouble. So long as they win elections and populists aspirations are confined to the margins of society democracy is represented as a big success. But the very minute people vote the “wrong way” the mainstream commentators craft alarmist accounts about democratic backsliding. That is why the Remainer lobby often represents the outcome of the Brexit Referendum as an expression of “democratic backsliding”.
In theory, the term democratic backsliding refers to the declining integrity of democratic values. In practice it means the estrangement of significant sections of the public from their political institutions. The term democratic backsliding serves to mystify a very significant development, which is the legitimacy crisis of the legacy political establishment. Once understood from this perspective it becomes evident that it is not democracy that people no longer trust but the people and the institutions that rule over society.
As it happens the narrative of “democracy is in trouble” smacks of pure hypocrisy. Those who communicate this narrative are not so much interested in the integrity of democracy but in ensuring that people vote the right way. From their perspective if people vote the wrong way than democracy becomes dispensable. That is why more and more we hear the refrain that there is “too much democracy”. “Democracy Works Better when there is less of it” warned Financial Times commentator, Janan Ganesh.3 As far he is concerned, “no global trend is better documented than the crisis of democracy”, by which he means that too often people vote against the advice of the elites.
North Africa Ep. 4: Quiet Week Before the Desert Storm
World War Two
Published 18 Oct 2025Late Feb–early Mar 1941: convoys from Naples build up 5th Light as MG Battalion 8 and artillery arrive; Rommel wins deployments and edges the line from Nofilia toward Arco dei Fileni. Luftwaffe raids batter Malta, mines choke Suez, RAF assets drain to Greece, and Axis forward probes tighten the noose around El Agheila while Britain improvises under strain.
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QotD: The Indian Civil Service
I think about The Ruling Caste often when I think about the turds in the Apparat. Looked at from the outside, the ICS were apparatchiks, too. Indeed, even more so than actual apparatchiks, since “apparatchik” means something like “expert without portfolio” and while the ICS had two broad “tracks” (if I recall correctly), “civil” and “legal”, in practice most every ICS man was supposed to be able to do pretty much everything, including (again IIRC) assume military command of local forces if necessary.
Given that there were never more than 200K Britons in the Raj at any one time, how could it be otherwise?
And the ICS was as fully ideologized as the Soviet (or AINO) Apparat. The French gave us the lovely phrase mission civilisatrice, but that’s what the ICS was doing, too. Lord Macauley was the big mover behind the English Education Act of 1835, which explicitly designed to
form a class who may be interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern – a class of persons Indian in blood and colour, but English in tastes, in opinions, in morals and in intellect. To that class we may leave it to refine the vernacular dialects of the country, to enrich those dialects with terms of science borrowed from the Western nomenclature, and to render them by degrees fit vehicles for conveying knowledge to the great mass of the population.
There were two huge differences between the ICS and the Apparat, though, that really come out reading Gilmour’s book. First, and actually least important, was the obvious fact that English education was superior. Macauley really gave “native” literature both barrels — nobody condescends like an Englishman — but he wasn’t wrong. In 1835 you could take the “scientific” literature of every other race on the planet combined and get … the Iron Age? Maybe? 200K Britons could dominate 750 million Indians because
whatever happens, we have got
the Maxim gun, and they have not.Or “steam power” or “replaceable parts” or “calculus” or what have you. Season to taste.
The second — and far, far more important — difference between the ICS and the Apparat, though, was that the ICS was in general composed of decent people. In a very real sense, all imperialism is “cultural imperialism”. Rome became an empire by whomping all its enemies, but it stayed an empire by giving its enemies a great deal. Life was simply better — orders of magnitude better — inside the Empire than outside.
And the reason for this is simple, so simple that you need many years of long and hideously expensive training, by highly skilled and fanatically motivated indoctrinators, to miss it. Macauley, Caesar, Confucius, anyone who wrote anything on barbarian management at any point, anywhere in the world, well into the 20th century, said basically the same thing: Our material culture is the result of our cultural culture.
You can learn to operate our stuff. Obviously so — with only 200K Britons throughout the Subcontinent, the Raj was quite obviously run by Indians. And they did a bang-up job, too, such that India at independence had the real potential to become a first world country (note to folks getting ready to break away from a globe-spanning empire: Never elect a lunatic socialist yoga dude as your first prime minister. He’ll go full retard and set you back 50 years … and he’ll be shooting for 500). You might even learn how to maintain our stuff, maybe even build a few cheap knockoff copies of our stuff.
But it’ll never be more than that — shitty knockoff copies, gruesomely expensive, and available only to the elite — unless you embrace as much of the culture that created the stuff as you can stand. The English themselves are a great example: They were blue-assed savages when Caesar found them, but they got with the program, and look how well that worked out. Ditto the Gauls (“Our ancestors, the Gauls!”) and all the rest.
It’s the culture, stupids. The culture of the ICS was English culture — “play up, play up, and play the game!” sounds like baloney to jaded Postmodern ears, but listen:
The sand of the desert is sodden red,—
Red with the wreck of a square that broke; —
The Gatling’s jammed and the Colonel dead,
And the regiment blind with dust and smoke.
The river of death has brimmed his banks,
And England’s far, and Honour a name,
But the voice of a schoolboy rallies the ranks:
“Play up! play up! and play the game!”As poetry it’s shit, but if that doesn’t make you want to get up out of your chair and take a swing at somebody, then you, sir, have no hair on your scrotum, and will never know a woman’s touch (trannies don’t count).
They really believed that, those Eton schoolboys out there East of Suez. Or, at least, they behaved as if they did, and everything else flowed from that behavior. Recall that it was a coin flip, going East of Suez — chances are you wouldn’t be coming back, or if you did, it would be as a malarial ruin. But they went anyway, though England’s far and Honour a name, because that’s just what they did. Even at their worst — and their worst was very bad; Gilmour pulls no punches — you can’t help but admire them a little, the arrogant bastards. Their convictions were sometimes awful, but they had the courage of them … and courage is magnificent.
Severian, “Ruling Caste II”, Founding Questions, 2022-03-10.
October 18, 2025
The Battle of Sedan: The Anatomy of Failure
World War Two
Published 17 Oct 2025In May 1940, a period of ten days flipped the world order on its head. France, the titan of the Great War, was carved apart by the armored fist of the Wehrmacht: Panzergruppe Kleist. Now, in this new feature-length production, we explore why it happened, whether this was ever avoidable, and whether France’s flaws stemmed from incompetence, or something far more sinister.
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Gerät Potsdam: Mauser Copies the Sten Gun
Forgotten Weapons
Published 2 Jun 2025In the fall of 1944, the Mauser company was given a contract to develop drawings of a direct copy of the British Sten gun (code named Gerät Potsdam), and to manufacture 10,000 of them. In fact, they were to make two different sets of drawings; one suitable for large factory use (like their own) and one for use with distributed small shops making parts for final assembly elsewhere (which is how much of British Sten production was done). The contract was fulfilled and 9972 guns in total were produced and accepted by the German military in November and December of 1944.
Why would Germany was a copy of the Sten? Well, they actually had a decent number of them. The Allies were air-dropping Stens all over Europe, and a lot of those drops were captured by German troops, not the resistance fighters they were intended for. By the end of the war the Germans were in desperate need of arms, and the Sten was both simple and already in some German use with the Volkssturm … so it actually was not a totally unreasonable idea to produce more of them.
Today, the Potsdam is an extremely rare gun to find. The two visible identifying features are the magazine well and barrel shroud, which are both made with a folded and spot welded seam. The barrels are also identifiable as they have 6 groove rifling, which the British did not use in the Sten.
Before the Potsdam production was finished, Mauser began working on further plans to simplify the design. That would be the Gerät Neumunster, aka the MP 3008. For that part of the story, see my video on the MP 3008:
• German Sten Copy: MP 3008, aka Gerät Neumü…
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October 17, 2025
The Original Kaiserschmarrn of the Austrian Empire
Tasting History with Max Miller
Published 13 May 2025Scrambled pancake with raisins and plum compote
City/Region: Austria
Time Period: 1858Like many food origin stories, the ones for kaiserschmarrn are varied and no one knows which, if any, are true. What is true is that Kaiser Franz Joseph I did really enjoy this dish, and as a result kaiserschmarrn became popular throughout the Austrian Empire and is still served in many restaurants today.
This kaiserschmarrn isn’t as sweet as modern versions I’ve had, but it’s still delicious. The vanilla sugar caramelizes and adds a pleasant bit of crunch, the cream makes for a richer pancake, and the plum compote is a lovely addition.
Kaiser-Schmarren.
Whisk 4 decilitres of sweet cream with 4 egg yolks, 2 decilitres flour, and a little salt, add 4 egg whites, beaten to snow, and raisins. Pour the whole thing into hot beef fat or butter, let it get nicely brown like Mehl-Schmarren, prepare it in the dish and sprinkle it with vanilla sugar.
Mehl-Schmarren.
… Place it in the oven so it rises nicely. Then remove it and place it on a rapid heat. When it’s stiff and browned on the bottom, you turn it over with the pancake spatula, let it brown again on the bottom, then tear it into large pieces with a fork and serve it quickly so it doesn’t dry out.
Plum Compote.
Plums are either halved or left whole and peeled. They are placed in hot water where the skin can easily come off. They are then simmered with a little sugar, water, and cinnamon.
— Die Süddeutsche Küche by Katharina Prato, 1858
October 16, 2025
“The ‘big secret’ of the Soviet archives was that the communists really were communist”
Big Serge talks to historian Sean McMeekin, the author of Stalin’s War and other works that some call “revisionist” for their different views of “settled” historical events:
Big Serge: “One of the first things that stands out about your work is that you have found success writing about topics which are very familiar to people and have a large extant corpus of writing. World War One, the Russian Revolution, World War Two, and now a broad survey of Communism – these are all subjects with no shortage of literature, and yet you have consistently managed to write books that feel refreshing and new. In a sense, your books help “reset” how people understand these events, so for example Stalin’s War was very popular and was not perceived as just another World War Two book. Would you say that this is your explicit objective when you write, and more generally, how do you approach the challenge of writing about familiar subjects?”
Dr. McMeekin: “Yes, I think that is an important goal when I write. I have often been called a revisionist, and it is not usually meant as a compliment, but I don’t particularly mind the label. I have never understood the idea that a historian’s job is simply to reinforce or regurgitate, in slightly different form, our existing knowledge of major events. If there is nothing new to say, why write a book?
Of course, it is not easy to say something genuinely new about events such as the First World War, the Russian Revolution, or World War Two. The scholar in me would like to think that I have been able to do so owing to my discovery of new materials, especially in Russian and other archives less well-trodden by western historians until recently, and that is certainly part of it. But I think it is more important that I come to this material – and older material, too – with new questions, and often surprisingly obvious ones.
For example, in The Russian Origins of the First World War, I simply took up Fritz Fischer’s challenge, which for some reason had been forgotten after “Fischerites” (most of them less than careful readers of Fischer, apparently) took over the field. In the original 1961 edition of Griff nach der Weltmacht (Germany’s “Bid” or “Grab” for World Power, a title translated more blandly but descriptively into English as Germany’s Aims in the First World War), Fischer pointed out that he was able to subject German war aims to withering scrutiny because basically every German file (not destroyed in the wars) had been declassified and opened to historians owing to Germany’s abject defeat in 1945 – while pointing out that, if the secret French, British, and Russian files on 1914 were ever opened, a historian could do the same thing for one of the Entente Powers. I had already done a Fischer-esque history on German WWI strategy, especially Germany’s use of pan-Islam (The Berlin-Baghdad Express), inspired by a similar epigraph in an old edition of John Buchan’s wartime thriller Greenmantle – Buchan predicted that a historian would come along one day to tell the story “with ample documents”, joking that when this happened he would retire and “fall to reading Miss Austen in a hermitage”. So it was a logical progression to ask, if Fischer can do this for Germany’s war aims, why not Russia?
Readers may have missed the obvious Fischer inspiration for Russian Origins owing to the editors at Harvard/Belknap, who thought my original title – the obviously Fischer-inspired Russia’s Aims in the First World War – was boring and unsexy. Probably this helped sell books, but it did lend my critics an easy line that I was “blaming Russia for the First World War” rather than simply applying a Fischer-esque lens to Russia’s war aims. Some also called me Russophobic, which is understandable, though I think it misses the point. To my mind, subjecting Russian strategic thinking, wartime diplomacy and maneuvering to the same scrutiny as those routinely applied to Germany and the other Powers is taking the country seriously on its own terms, rather than ignoring Russia, as nearly every historian of, say, Gallipoli has done.
A book on Russian war aims was also long overdue. Other than an underwhelming Chai Lieven study from 1983 and a few articles, no one had really done this for Russia since Soviet scholars and archivists had (with very different motivations) published annotated volumes of secret Russian diplomatic correspondence back in the 1920s. For me, this was a door wide open, and I walked right in. Stalin’s War is in many ways a sequel to Russia’s Aims in the First World War (my own title!), written in a similar spirit, albeit much longer and in some ways more ambitious.
With the Russian Revolution, it was probably still harder to say anything really new, particularly after the popular histories of Richard Pipes and Orlando Figes (and a huge new literature written partly in response to them) came out in the 1990s. And I do not think my “take” was quite as revisionist or controversial as those on WWI or WW2. What I did try to do, in order to add something new to the story, was to combine my own research in a number of areas (Russian army morale reports before and after Order No. 1, depositions taken after the July Days, police reports from 1917, Bolshevik finances and expropriation policies, etc.) with new work done by others since 1991 on, especially, Russia’s military performance in WWI (a topic almost completely ignored in Cold War era literature on the Revolution, both Soviet and western), to reinterpret both the February and October Revolutions. In full disclosure, I would have preferred to write an ambitious history on just 1917, where I had the most original material and new points to make, but my publisher wanted a one-volume “comprehensive” history of the Revolution, so that is what I wrote. Like most historians and writers, I like to think that I write entirely from inspiration with a free hand, but of course there are all kinds of factors that play into our work.
Getting back to your question – while I have certainly done original research for all of these books, I am hardly the only historian to take advantage of Russian archives opened after the collapse of the USSR in 1991 – including, I should add, all the incredible archival material compiled by Russian researchers in the 1990s and 2000s into huge published volumes of Soviet-era documents. I think it is my mindset that differentiates me from other scholars who have taken similar advantage of this opportunity. Simon Sebag Montefiore, for example, uncovered incredibly rich veins of new material for Stalin. Court of the Red Tsar, as Antony Beevor did for Stalingrad, both of which books made an enormous splash. They’re not exactly “revisionists”, though. Rather, these historians retell stories already partly familiar, but with reams of fascinating new details that greatly enrich the story. I think this is a wonderful way to write history, and thousands of readers evidently agree. It is just not what I do.”
Big Serge: “I’m glad you brought up The Russian Origins of the First World War. This was the first of your books that I read, and I found it interesting for a counterintuitive reason, in that its arguments seem like they should be obvious and not particularly controversial. The essence of the book is that the Tsarist state had agency and tried to use the First World War to achieve important strategic objectives. That should be obvious, after all this was an immensely powerful state with a long pedigree of muscular foreign policy, but people are very accustomed to the Guns of August sort of narrative where all the agency and initiative is with Germany, and everyone else is reduced to the role of objects in a story where Germany is the sole subject.
It makes me think somewhat of a quip that Dr. Stephen Kotkin has used in interviews about his Stalin biographies, when he says that the “big secret” of the Soviet archives was that the communists really were communist. His point is that, even in a very convoluted and secretive regime, sometimes what you see really is what you get. I think you made a similar sort of point with Russian Origins. If I could paraphrase you, the big reveal is that the big, powerful Tsarist Empire was behaving like a big powerful empire, in that it had cogent war aims and it consistently sought to work towards those – so consistently in fact that the war aims were initially largely unchanged after the fall of the monarchy in 1917. You’re saying something very similar with Stalin’s War: the shocking secret here is that a powerful, expansionist, heavily militarized Soviet regime acted like it and worked aggressively to pursue its own peculiar interests.
How do you conceptualize this? It strikes me as a little bit odd, because, as you say, there is sometimes a bit of a stigma round the label “revisionist”, but your books generally present schemas that are fairly intuitive: Tsarist Russia was a big, powerful empire that pursued big imperial aims; Stalin was the protagonist of his own story and exercised a muscular, self-interested foreign policy; the Bolsheviks used extraordinary violence to conquer an anarchic environment. Are you surprised that people are surprised at these things?”
Dr. McMeekin: “I wish I was surprised, and perhaps at first I was, but I suppose that, over the years, I have become inured to the shocked! Shocked! reactions I receive when I point out fairly obvious things. Historians, like most groups, tend to be pack animals, who like to run in safe herds. When it comes to a familiar subject such as the outbreak of World War I, the literature tends to groove around well-trodden themes and questions. Certainly it has done since Fischerites took over the field: it’s Germany all the time, with perhaps a nod to Austria-Hungary in the Serbian backstory, or Britain with the naval race. France and Russia had almost disappeared from the story, as if one of the two major continental alliance blocs was irrelevant. I was heartened that my own treatment of Russia’s role in the outbreak of the war and Russia’s war aims garnered attention and shaped the conversation, both in itself and through Christopher Clark’s bestseller Sleepwalkers (which draws on Russian Origins). By contrast, Stefan Schmidt’s pathbreaking 2009 study of the French role in the outbreak of the war (Frankreichs Aussenpolitik in der Julikrise 1914), which Clark and I draw on heavily, has still not been translated into English, making barely a ripple in the profession. Clark and I have poked around with English-language publishers, trying to gin up interest in a translation, but so far without luck.
With the Second World War, I suppose the “shock” value is still greater, and perhaps therefore even less surprising. In Germany, after all, there are laws on the books making it illegal to “trivialize” the Holocaust, for example by foregrounding Soviet war crimes on the eastern front, and of course whole areas of the war such as the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, Soviet war plans in 1941, and even Lend-Lease are highly sensitive in Russia, though I’ll note that there has been a curious exception for the “full-on” revisionism of Rezun-Suvorov (Icebreaker, etc.) – perhaps because his thesis is so extreme as to be easily caricatured, or maybe just because his books sell so well, it has never been difficult to find them in Russian bookstores. In a way, I also think the popularity of Suvorov’s books in Russia relates to the way they do take the Soviet Union seriously as a great power, as I do, of course – whether or not one agrees with his thesis, and I’m sure many of his Russian readers do not, it is less condescending than western histories that treat the Soviets as passive victims of fate in the Barbarossa story before Stalin woke them up.
I was perhaps more surprised at the visceral reaction to Stalin’s War in Britain, particularly my discussion of Operation Pike (eg British plans to bomb Soviet oil installations in Baku in 1940), which sent certain reviewers into paroxysms of rage I found absolutely bewildering. If anything, I should have thought my sharply critical treatment of Hopkins and Roosevelt would have offended Americans far more gravely than my slightly more sympathetic portrayal of Britain’s wartime statesmen, but it was quite the opposite. Certainly some American Roosevelt admirers were annoyed, but this was nothing like British reviewers’ hysteria over Operation Pike. Curiously enough I had dinner not long ago with one of these reviewers, and he brought up Stalin’s War. He was very civil, full of British charm, but he still wanted desperately to know why I had argued that Britain “should have gone to war against the Soviet Union instead of Nazi Germany”. As always when I am accused of this – another reviewer stated this point blank in the TLS – I simply asked him if he could locate a passage in the book where I had stated any such thing? The entire subject of World War II has become so encrusted with emotion and taboos that I think it clouds people’s vision. They see ghosts.”
QotD: The Roman proclivity to accept changes that “go back to the way things used to be”
What I will say is that the Romans were very conservative in their outlook, believing that things ought to be done according to the mos maiorum – “the customs of [our] ancestors”. The very fact that the way you say “ancestors” in Latin is maiores, “the greater ones” should tell you something about the Roman attitude towards the past. And so often real innovations in Roman governance were explained as efforts to get back to the “way things were”, but of course “the way things were” is such a broad concept that you can justify pretty radical changes in some things to restore other things to “the way they were”.
The most obvious example of this, of course, is Augustus with his PR-line of a res publica restituta, “a republic restored”. Augustus made substantial changes (even if one looked past his creation of an entire shadow-office of emperor!) to Roman governance on the justification that this was necessary to “restore” the Republic; exactly what is preserved tells you a lot about what elements of the Roman (unwritten) constitution were thought to be essential to the Republic by the people that mattered (the elites). And Augustus was hardly the first; Sulla crippled the tribunate, doubled the size of the Senate and made substantial reforms to the laws claiming that he was restoring things to the way they had been – that is, restoring the Senate to its position of prominence.
And one thing that is very clear about the Greeks and Romans generally is that they had at best a fuzzy sense of their past, often ascribing considerable antiquity to things which were not old but which stretched out of living memory. Moreover there is a general sense, pervading Greek and Latin literature that people in the past were better than people now, more virtuous, more upright, possibly even physically better. You can see this notion in authors from Hesiod to Sallust. This shouldn’t be overstressed; you also had Aristotelian/Polybian “cyclical” senses of history along with moments of present-triumphalism (Vergil, for instance, and his imperium sine fine). But still there seems to have been a broad sense of the folk system that things get worse over time and thus things must have been better in the past and thus returning to the way things were done is better. We’ve discussed this thought already where it intersects with Roman religion.
And the same time, here we run into the potential weakness of probing elite mentalités in trying to understand a society. Some Romans seem quite aware of positive change over time; Pliny the Elder and Columella are both aware of improving agricultural technology in their own day, particularly as compared to older economic writing by Cato the Elder. Polybius has no problem having the Romans twice adopt new and better ship designs during the First Punic War (though both are “just-so” stories; the ancients love “just-so” stories to explain new innovations or inventions). And sometimes Roman leaders did represent things as very much new; even Augustus combined his res publica restituta rhetoric with the idea that he was ushering in a saeculum novum, a “new age” (based on the idea of 110 year cycles in history).
So there is complexity here. The Romans most certainly did not have our strong positive associations with youth and progress. Their culture expected deference to elders and certainly didn’t expect “progress” most of the time; things, they thought, generally ought to be done as they had “always been done”. Consequently, framing things as a return to the mos maiorum or as a means to return to it was always a strong political framing and presumably many of the folks doing those things believed it. On the other hand the Romans seem well aware that some of the things they did were new and that not all of these “firsts” were bad and that some things had seemed to have gotten better or more useful since the days of their maiores. And some Romans, particularly emperors, are relatively unabashed about making dramatic breaks with tradition and precedent; Diocletian comes to mind here in particular.
Bret Devereaux, “Referenda ad Senatum: January 13, 2023: Roman Traditionalism, Ancient Dates and Imperial Spies”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2023-01-13.
