Forgotten Weapons
Published 20 Jun 2026The FN MAG is one of those guns that is so durable and well designed that it continues to be one of the best options in its field despite being nearly 70 years old. To meet the demand for mounting larger and heavier optics, particularly night-time clip on sorts, FN developed a long rail kit. This sounds like a pretty straight-forward thing, but adding lots of extra optics to the top cover has a number of second-order issues. To solve them all, the kit includes a strengthened hinge mechanism, overtravel stop, articulated barrel handle, and adjustable-length buttstock. The stock by itself is called the FN MAG Tactical, with the rest of the kit coming as a package. It is able to mount to any existing MAG, including all models of US M240 and British L7/GPMG.
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October 23, 2026
FN MAG Tactical with Long Rail Upgrade Kit
QotD: Peter Green on Epicureanism and Cynicism
But if Stoicism was the shallow George W. Bush evangelicalism of its day, it at least fares better than Epicureanism, the other popular and enduring school of Hellenistic thought. The traditional Christian attack on Epicurus was that he was an atheist and hedonist. More modern scholars emphasize that Epicurus’s belief in pleasure as the highest good actually encourages moderation and avoiding pain or fear so as to achieve tranquility.
Green picks neither of these interpretations, instead arguing that Epicureanism was totally a cult. Epicureans joined communes after swearing oaths to obey “the Leader”, whom they “flattered like a god”. “Act always”, they were told, “as though Epicurus is watching”. The Leader “seems to have enjoyed droit de seigneur with several of his followers’ wives and mistresses”. In Epicurus’s famous Garden outside Athens, nobody actually worked, with the commune instead sustained in “endowed leisure” by donations extracted from supporters across the Mediterranean. “Send us, for the care of our holy body, first fruits on behalf of yourself and your children”, Epicurus writes to one of his disciples. In Green’s telling, “Epicureanism was, in the last resort, the brainchild of an antisocial and anti-intellectual dogmatist, with a bee in his bonnet about providential gods, and more than a passing urge … to replace the deity himself”.
Quite the cynical attitude … except that Green is just as harsh on the literal Cynics. Being an ascetic who lives on the street in ostentatious poverty while engaging in public defecation and masturbation doesn’t make you a rebel, it just makes you a loser:
The lifestyle is strictly self-promoting; it has no real ulterior end in view. We adopt the lifestyle to be happy. Happiness is defined through the lifestyle, which becomes an end in itself. The manipulation of these social concepts, the “natural” and the “shameless”, simply gives the Cynic an excuse to thumb his nose at the society he is busy rejecting. … Worst of all, the so-called self-sufficiency is a patent sham. The Cynic, in the last resort, exists as a tolerated parasite on the society that he condemns. … The situation is not unfamiliar today.
Blake Neff, “GUEST REVIEW: Alexander to Actium, by Peter Green”, Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf, 2025-10-20.
October 22, 2026
QotD: The “numbers fallacy” in World War II
During the war the smaller campaigns tended to get less credit — though it is sometimes suspicious that numbers are valued in some circumstances, and area in others. The Mediterranean Front against the Axis was an extraordinarily long campaign over an extremely large area, yet many – particularly Americans who often fail to understand the Mediterranean’s importance to intercontinental strategy – discount its scale and significance. (A British general visiting the Soviets responded to toasts about the battles of Stalingrad and Moscow by offering a toast to El Alamein. The bemused Soviets asked how big the battle was, and then commented “we would call that a skirmish” – a point which emphasises the fact that the hundreds of Soviet divisions embraced by historians of the Eastern Front were rarely as big as a British brigade or American Regimental Combat Team. To get a real comparison western divisions should be compared to Soviet corps.)
Similarly the Burmese and New Guinea theatres are incredibly undervalued in their role against Japan. There were more Japanese divisions fighting longer and harder in either place than everywhere that American troops fought the Japanese put together. (The fact that in New Guinea it was Australians rather than Americans who did most of the successful fighting – the American troops first assigned disappointed their vainglorious Füaut;hrer MacArthur enormously at first – might have had an influence on this ranking.)
By contrast the Western Front against Germany in 1944 to 45 is overstated both in the area it covered, and in the number of troops involved (almost half the US troops listed for that campaign did not arrive until it was already almost over. A dozen divisions had barely landed in France before the Germans surrendered.) Which puts it in the same category as the Pacific campaign, which, if the allied troops are discounted – as they so often were by the Americans – rarely saw more than a couple of American divisions at a time engaged anywhere.
The confusion is added to by the enigma that remains China, which is simultaneously undervalued and overvalued. It is undervalued in that China and Manchuria occupied the attention of 80% of the Japanese army throughout the war. Which means that by the standards applied by some historians, China was the Soviet Union of the East, and deserves all the glory that was lavished on communist Russia by the trendy historians of the last generation. On the other hand it was overvalued, in that China achieved virtually nothing in the war against the Japanese apart from occupying large numbers of very low-grade garrison troops. In fact when the US Air Force in one of its fits of vainglory, attempted to bomb Japan into submission from bases in China: the Japanese garrison troops stirred themselves enough to sweep forward and conquer – without any trouble at all – the provinces being used as bases (Operation Ichi-Go).
Nigel Davies, “Oversimplification: The Numbers Fallacy in WWII”, rethinking history, 2009-03-08.
October 21, 2026
The first modern wine critic: Philip the Bold of Burgundy
In The Critic, Henry Jeffreys identifies the first post-Roman Empire wine critic in the noble person of Philip II, Duke of Burgundy, who, in 1395 …
Philip the Bold (Philip II, Duke of Burgundy), 1342-1404.
Unknown painter of the Flemish School via Wikimedia Commons.
… banished the Gamay grape from his lands, describing it as an “evil and disloyal” plant. The only grape for Philip was Noiriens, known today as Pinot Noir.
Peasants loved Gamay because it ripened early and produced lots of grapes but Philip wanted small quantities of high quality wine which Pinot Noir is better suited for.
And that’s how it’s been ever since: Gamay has been shunned in Burgundy, going only into the cheapest wines, whereas Pinot Noir is lionised around the world.
Wine 101 says that some grapes are better than others. It’s common for wine-lovers to have a favourite and often a least favourite grape. Philip the Bold was way ahead of his time here. Most wine drinkers didn’t catch up with grape varieties until much later.
We have an American, Frank Schoonmaker, to thank for this. In the 1940s he came up with the idea of labelling California wines by variety rather than giving them fake French names like Hearty Burgundy or Mountain Chablis.
It took a while, but this is now the established way of classifying wines. For Schoonmaker there was a hierarchy of varieties with the great French ones, naturally, at the top. He wrote in his book American Wines: “There are only about 30 or 40 superior grape varieties in the world and only about a dozen are capable of producing great wine. No really distinguished wine has ever been made from an inferior grape.”
Some grapes were good and some were bad. In the 1980s and 1990s the French government encouraged growers in the Languedoc to pull up their Carignan and Cinsault vines and replace them with so-called cépages améliorateurs, improving varieties, like Syrah or Cabernet Sauvignon. You can understand the logic. Syrah sells, whereas the traditional grapes have a Gamay-like tendency to produce lots of grapes of mediocre quality if overfertilised and not pruned severely.
In Chile, Cinsault is known as “cargadora” meaning the loaded one. Home gardeners will know exactly this tendency. When growing tomatoes, some strains produce massive quantities of fruit with very little flavour. In contrast, we had a plant last year that produced only one piece of fruit the whole summer — but it was exceptionally tasty. I am sure Philip the Bold would have approved.
In the 1970s, Canadian winemakers were selling beverages labelled as “Burgundy” and “Claret”, but after the French government and then the EU started getting pushy about wines named for the great French wine traditions, they eventually got onto the same naming pattern pioneered by Schoonmaker and other Californian winemakers. If “truth in advertising” laws had applied to wine, those 1970s Canadian wines would have had consumer-deterring names like “oversweetened alcoholic grape juice” and “made from randomly selected grapes of unknown provenance”.
Can you tell I don’t miss any of the Canadian wines I sampled in the 1970s?
QotD: Religious institutions in the late western Roman Empire
The emperors and the Roman state had also taken an active role beginning in the fourth century in defining exactly what the “right” sort of Christianity was. In response to a dispute over the ordination of bishops in North Africa (the “Donatist” schism), Constantine called a council of bishops to convene in Arles in 314 to resolve the matter (it didn’t work and Constantine began persecuting the remaining Donatists). But that council would hardly be the last – Constantine convoked the first ecumenical council (one that in theory reflected the entire Christian Church) in Nicaea in 325 in order to create a single universal Christian doctrine and resolve a number of internal disputes (having grown as a religion in secret and facing persecution, as you might imagine Christianity had a lot of significant local variations). The emperor Theodosius I (r. 379-395) convened the next major council at Constantinople in 381; after that it was the emperor Theodosius II (r. 402-450) who convened the next at Ephesus in 431 and then the emperor Marcian (r. 450-457) who convened the next at Chalcedon in 451. All of these councils served to define what the “right” Christianity was (“Chalcedonian” Christianity, named after the council), putting some belief systems outside of the doctrine of the Roman Church.
But whereas other Roman institutions didn’t survive the collapse of Roman political authority, the Church as an institution very much did. It was perhaps not obvious that it would – many of the “barbarians” had embraced a non-Chalcedonian Christianity, Arianism, and so might have been hostile to the Church as it existed in Rome. But in practice the need to consolidate the loyalty of their Roman Chalcedonian Christian subjects (on this, note Brown, op. cit. 2nd ed., 105-6, 133-8) and the prestige that the institutional Church held led the rulers of Rome’s successor states to convert to Chalcedonian Christianity; the last of the major Arian Christian kings was Garibald, King of the Lombards in 671.
Indeed, the institutional Church was in some ways a lifeboat in which other elements of the Late Roman world were carried through the storm of the fifth century into the Middle Ages. We’ve already talked about the Church’s role in preserving a fair chunk of the Latin literary tradition. Much of this was done through the spread and then perseverance of monasticism. The first communities of monks emerged in the Eastern Roman Empire in the fourth century and spread through the failing Roman Empire in the fourth and fifth centuries. The Western monastic tradition builds from this with the foundation of Monte Cassino in 529 by Benedict of Nursia and the promulgation of the Rule of Saint Benedict.
Meanwhile, the Church also emerged as one of the central institutions in the cities of the Roman world, with the bishop, the religious head of the Church in a given city, emerging as a key figure in civic governance. While the figure of the bishop rose to importance in both the east and the west, in the east, bishops largely did not move into becoming secular leaders alongside religious figures, in part presumably because the central Roman authority still existed to handle those functions. But in the west, the decline of both civic and centralized government left bishops in the breach. This in turn often preserved older Roman political geography as Liebeschuetz notes, with the civitas surviving as an administrative unit in the form of the diocese of a bishop, precisely because those bishoprics were originally established along Roman administrative lines and remained so even after Roman administration vanished. Bishops ended up taking up some of the tasks that in the past would have fallen to a Roman governor and since they had their seats in the embattled Roman cities, many of those cities survived the difficult fifth and sixth centuries precisely because they were the seat of a bishop.
And in order to run the institution of the Church, its bishoprics and their diocese, it needed both educated clergy who could read the Bible but also administrators who had learned the law – by which they meant Roman law. Secular learning had largely collapsed with the Roman Empire in the west – it had existed to provide training for wealthy men to become secular administrators for the central imperial government and so when the demand for that kind of training vanished, so too did the schools that trained the administrators and jurists. And so the Church had to train them itself, setting up episcopal and monastic schools which trained theology, but also law and administration (and of course provided the context for that survival of Latin literature as a teaching tool). As levels of education and literacy among the secular elite declined, it made sense for kings to employ bishops and other members of the clergy as members of their own administration, leading to this distinctly Roman religious institution having a key place within the secular “barbarian” kingdoms that followed.
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: Rome: Decline and Fall? Part II: Institutions”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2022-01-28.
October 20, 2026
Britain’s regulatory “vetocracy”
I learned a new word today, although it describes a phenomenon as old as bureaucracy. “Vetocracy” in Britain is a combination of ordinary government bureausclerosis with wider regulatory powers that can (and are) used to “veto” otherwise legal and beneficial activities:
A public company in the UK was building a high-speed railway when it suddenly faced a regulation that few could have predicted: a £100 million ($132 million) bat tunnel. The railway passed through Sheephouse Wood, an area inhabited by rare Bechstein’s bats. To comply with environmental regulations that protect the bats from colliding with high-speed trains, the company had to build a roughly one-kilometer covered structure alongside the railway. This structure has since become widely known in the UK as the “bat tunnel.”
If you think this is just one case, let me tell you about the fish disco. EDF Energy was developing a new nuclear power station in Somerset, which draws cooling water from the Severn Estuary. The project faced regulatory requirements to reduce the number of fish being drawn into and killed by its cooling-water intake pipes. EDF agreed to three measures: specially designed low-velocity intake heads, a fish recovery-and-return system, and an acoustic fish deterrent—underwater speakers that make noise to steer fish away, nicknamed the “fish disco.” The acoustic deterrent alone reportedly costs about $66 million, while EDF says the full fish-protection package costs more than $926 million.
The problem with the UK is that it has become a vetocracy. Francis Fukuyama, the famous author of The End of History, explored this problem in his often-overlooked book Political Order and Political Decay. The concept helps explain part of the productivity puzzle in the Western world. Vetocracy means “rule by veto”: a political system with so many points at which organized minorities, courts, agencies, legislators, or interest groups can block action that the majority struggles to govern.
At first glance, this might seem necessary to protect democracy from majority rule and dictatorship. The separation of powers, independent courts, and an independent judiciary are essential safeguards. As Montesquieu famously wrote, “When the legislative and executive powers are united in the same person, or in the same body of magistrates, there can be no liberty.” But vetocracy is not simply about separating powers and protecting minority rights from the majority; it is about paralyzing democratic institutions and preventing the government from functioning.
Giving any bureaucracy the power to say “no” almost always means that organization will say “no” far more often than it says “yes”, because there’s no risk to the bureaucrat or their bosses for blocking something, but there’s a tangible risk if they approve something that later proves dangerous or even just controversial. Bureaucracies generally prefer to operate largely out of sight — and therefore out of public scrutiny — and danger to the public or controversy in the media brings public attention to the organization or, worse, to the individual bureaucrat who said “yes”.
… the more serious costs are the ones unseen: the products that fail to come to fruition as a result of regulation. As the Austrian school economist Per Bylund has argued in his book The Seen, the Unseen, and the Unrealized: How Regulations Affect Our Everyday Lives, the problem with regulation is that it limits the possibilities of what could happen. It is not just about the direct financial cost of compliance. It is about the choices that disappear, the investments that never happen, and the economic freedom that is gradually eroded. The real cost of regulation is not only what we can see, but also what we never get to see because it was never built in the first place.
Vetocracy is a product of an overextended state: one that wants to be the dominant actor in the economy and micromanage every aspect of economic life. Sooner or later, it discovers that governing is not as easy as it looks. The barriers originally created by the state in the name of better governance can make effective governance almost impossible. A vetocracy is a democracy that has accumulated so many opportunities to say no that it has lost the practical ability to say yes.
October 19, 2026
Aimpoint CS: Revolutionary Battery Life for the Swedish Home Guard
Forgotten Weapons
Published 19 Jun 2026The Aimpoint CS is an optic designed specifically for the Swedish Home Guard, which wanted a red dot that was extremely durable and also capable of being left on for 10 years on a single battery. This was a very challenging requirement, and Aimpoint considered two paths to meet it. One was a pulsed LED to reduce actual “on” time of the dot, but this did not prove successful. The other was a traditional red dot, with improved design and power circuitry to allow an extended battery life. The new system was integrated into Aimpoint’s other optics (including the US M68CCO contract).
Along with the improved electronics, the CS used a large (approximately AA size) 3.7V battery hard-wired into the case. Per Swedish request, the battery was not user serviceable, and the optics are returned to Aimpoint for battery replacement every 10 years (they are on their third such cycle now). It also includes a set of hard rubber backup sights on top and a small length of picatinny rail that was never really used (it was intended for accessories like laser modules).
The Aimpoint CS was developed in 2001, adopted in 2002, and deliveries of about 60,000 total began in 2003. It was used on Home Guard AK4 rifles, and also on AK5s. They were not sold on the commercial market, and are very scarce in the US.
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October 18, 2026
Singapore: The rise of Lee Kuan Yew
At The Wrong Side of History, Ed West continues his review of Lee Kuan Yew’s autobiography, detailing the difficult period after the British withdrawal from overseas military commitments “East of Suez”, including the vast naval base in Singapore and the Royal Air Force’s Changi air base:
October 31, 1971, and the British are saying goodbye to their military base in Singapore, the city where the empire endured its greatest humiliation. Three years earlier, an increasingly straitened former imperial power had announced its immediate closure as part of their withdraw east of Suez. For the recently independent city-state, this was a disaster, and prime minister Lee Kuan Yew had done his best to postpone the big day. The city already suffered from high unemployment, and Britain’s military accounted for 20 per cent of Singapore’s GDP, providing 30,000 direct jobs and 40,000 in support.
Yet retreat was inevitable, and when the day came British forces were given a ceremonial send-off, Lee writes in his memoir, the withdrawal carried out with “good intentions, goodwill and good faith”. After 150 years in the Strait, the British were gone, handing over the airbase to the colony they created for the symbolic fee of one dollar.
Lee had cut his teeth in the independence movement, but the city-state could not survive without protection. As with many small countries which had depended on the British, Singapore now shifted its allegiances to its successor state, the United States of America.
The imperial retreat presented a huge financial headache for the former anti-colonial activist, but increasingly a more personal sense of unease. “I feared that slowly but inexorably British influence would decline”, he writes: “and American influence expand. For my generation born and bred in empire, it was not an easy change. I had to come to terms with American power without a British buffer. The British had enforced their will with a certain civility. The Americans were different, as I could see from the way they dealt with South Vietnamese leaders, and even with Thai and Filipino leaders who were not in as parlous a position as those in Saigon. America was a power on the ascendant, with bulging muscles and a habit of flexing them.”
Lee had built up a good relationship with both Harold Wilson and Edward Heath, and used this to delay the withdrawal for as long as possible. He had less luck in getting the British to help Singapore train their army, something they had done with Malaysia where the threat of communist insurgency necessitated it. Neither were most of the other newly independent states willing to help: Egypt’s Nasser recognised Singapore and sent good wishes, but ignored his requests for military aid. India’s prime minister Lal Bahadur Shastri also said no, so he turned to another small post-colonial nation surrounded by hostile neighbours. When a small group of Israelis arrived in November 1965, they had to keep their existence a secret to prevent unrest from the Malay minority. “To disguise their presence, we called them ‘Mexicans'”, he recalls: “They looked swarthy enough”.
The Chinese here traditionally shunned military service, “a historical legacy of the predatory habits of soldiers during the years of rebellions and warlords in China”. As trading people they looked down on the military as a career choices, and he quotes the Chinese saying “a good lad does not become a soldier, good steel does not become nails”.
Lee also had to negotiate the problem of “representation” which mars all multicultural societies. Under the British, the city had been policed by Malays, often recruited from Malaysia itself, as well as the more neutral Gurkhas. Now “we had to find some way to induct more Chinese and Indians into the police and armed forces to reflect their population mix”, otherwise they would not be accepted as legitimate. “We wanted the people to regard our soldiers as their protectors – a reversal from the days when army and police uniforms aroused fear and resentment as symbols of colonial coercion”.
Conscription, unpopular under the British, was reintroduced, and the authorities even set up military cadet corps in all secondary schools, although his colleague Goh Keng Swee reflected that “the Spartan approach to life does not come about naturally in a community that lives by buying and selling”. As with Israel, another small state formed by a market-dominant minority, they were forced to adapt their way of life to survive; yet rather than become the new Sparta, Singapore focussed on becoming the new Corinth, a commercial centre where great fortunes could be made. When the British finally withdrew, RAF Changi Air Base became Changi Airport, a transport hub which came to epitomise the city’s commercial success.
Tiger I: A Tank Too Heavy For Hitler’s War? – Nazi Rearmament 10
World War Two
Published 17 Oct 2026The Tiger I was one of World War II’s most feared tanks. But could its powerful 88 mm gun and thick armor compensate for the demands it placed on Germany’s factories, mechanics, and supply lines?
From competing Henschel and Porsche prototypes to combat at Leningrad, Kursk, Tunisia, and Normandy, we examine the Panzerkampfwagen VI Tiger I beyond its legendary reputation. Its firepower and protection made it a formidable opponent, but manufacturing, transporting, maintaining, and recovering this 57-ton heavy tank required resources Nazi Germany could increasingly ill afford.
In this episode of Nazi Rearmament, we explore:
• The Tiger I’s armor, armament, engine, and suspension
• The development contest between Henschel and Porsche
• Production costs, industrial constraints, and forced labor
• Early mechanical failures and later battlefield performance
• Heavy tank battalions and the capture of Tiger 131
• Why tactical successes could not resolve Germany’s strategic failuresWas the Tiger the deadliest beast of WWII, or a tank too heavy for Hitler’s war? Its history reveals how an effective battlefield weapon could still fall short of the war effort that produced it.
Fifty years of French decline
On X, auto-translated from the original French, Guillaume Herblot laments the dynamic, innovative France of fifty years ago in contrast to the sclerotic bureaucratic swamp it is today:
In France, we invented the Concorde.
In 1969, it took off and reached Mach 2, a symbol of Gaullist grandeur, designed to challenge the Americans.
In 1972, the TGV 001 broke the world speed record on turbine power (318 km/h).
In 1981, the electric TGV connected Paris to Lyon at 260 km/h. In 2007, it shattered the world rail speed record: 574.8 km/h.
In the 1970s, the Messmer Plan launched the largest civilian nuclear program in history: 58 reactors, providing up to 70-80% of our electricity, an energy independence that the whole world envied.
Dassault, Sud-Aviation, EDF, Framatome, SNCF: our engineers were the best. We were ten to twenty years ahead of almost everyone else.
Then 1981, Mitterrand. Massive nationalizations (banks, steel, chemicals, electronics, aeronautics). The 39-hour workweek. Auroux Laws. Exploding social charges. All-powerful unions. Punitive taxation. Rigidified labor laws.
In less than fifty years, socialism transformed a country of conquering engineers into a country of strikes, offshoring, and relative stagnation.
Industry went from about 28% of GDP to 11%.
The Concorde was abandoned. Our nuclear program was nearly dismantled for decades due to deadly political choices.
This isn’t fate; it’s the price of an ideology that preferred to redistribute and regulate rather than build and innovate.
A word to the wise.
On the topic of France and the French, it is rather surprising to find that as recently as the French Revolution, “French” was almost exclusively the language of the court, the mercantile middle classes in urban areas, and the church. Most “Frenchmen” spoke local dialects that had little in common with formal French:
A double guillotine
Musée de la Révolution française via Wikimedia Commons.
Just a few decades earlier [than 1900] the country was still a maze of local languages, while rural areas of 18th Century France were in many ways a foreign country.
“Most subjects of Louis XVI spoke their own language or dialect”
In the 1740s, the astronomer Jacques Cassini (son of the more famous astronomer Giovanni Cassini, for whom the saturnal probe is named), sent an expedition out to fully map the country for the first time. When one of its geometers climbed Mont Gerbier de Jonc, “he could take in at a glance several small regions whose inhabitants barely knew of each other’s existence”, author Graham Robb writes in The Discovery of France: A Historical Geography from the Revolution to the First World War. (My primary source for most of what follows).
To walk in any direction for a day was to become incomprehensible […] The people who saw the sun set behind the Gerbier de Jonc spoke one group of dialects; the people on the evening side spoke another. Forty miles to the north, the wine growers and silk-weavers of the Lyonnais spoke a different language altogether, which had yet to be identified and named by scholars. Yet another language was spoken in the region the traveller had left the day before, and though his own mother tongue, French, was a dialect of that language, he would have found it hard to understand the peasants who saw him pass” (3-4).
The insularity was especially pronounced in this region, the mountainous Massif Central, where “roads and byways came and went with the seasons … rivers were unnavigable” and “links to the rest of France practically non-existent”. Accentuating it was the truculent nature of the locals, who soon hacked Cassini’s geometer to death, apparently believing that a strangely clothed man pointing odd metal instruments at rocks was a sorcerer who was behind recent crop failures. A century later, another geographer said this region was best-viewed by balloon, but “only if the aeronaut can remain out of range of a rifle” (Robb, 5). But most other parts of France were only a little better. This was a country that was four-fifths rural at the time of the Revolution; “almost a third of the population (about ten million people) lived in isolated farms and cottages or in hamlets with fewer than thirty-five inhabitants and often no more than eight” (Robb, 13).
The French monarchy had tried to impose the French language from above, “requiring priests and those in liberal professions to speak French, and for church registers and public acts to be kept in French”. But “such controls only affected the surface of life in much of France”, Peter McPhee writes in A Social History of France: 1789-1914. “Most subjects of Louis XVI spoke their own language or dialect and lived within distinctive cultures of perception, language and ritual.”
Grégoire’s survey
In the first few years of the Revolution, the Abbé Henri Grégoire conducted a survey of language use in the whole country, asking each town hall questions like: “Did the people of the region have their own patois?” and “Could it be used to express intellectual concepts or was it riddled with obscenities and oaths?”
Everybody knew that the border regions included non-French speakers — Bretons, Basques, Flemings and Alsatians. And much of southern France spoke not French but a different Romance language, Occitan or langue d’oc. But even the ostensibly “French” or “Occitan” areas “turned out to be a muddle of incomprehensible dialects”.
In many parts, the dialect changed at the village boundary. Several respondents claimed that differences were perceptible at a distance of one league (less than three miles) and sometimes just a few feet, as the writer from Périgueux explained: ‘The patois’s reign ends at the river Nizonne. It is amazing to cross this little stream and to hear an entirely different patois, which sounds more like French’. In the Jura, there were ‘almost as many different patois as there are villages’. Even plants and stars had their own local names, as if each little region lived under a different sky. (Robb, 50-51)
Though the patois (“‘language’ proper is spoken only in the capital”, the Encyclopédie wrote) were most prevalent in the countryside, peasants weren’t the only speakers.
The city of Lyon was a hive of micro-dialects: ‘The river people, the butchers, the silk-workers, the fish-wives and the herb-sellers each have a language all their own’. In some southern regions, rich people, priests, scholars, lawyers and tradesmen all spoke the local dialect and ‘felt ill at ease when speaking French. If certain quartiers of Paris had been included in the questionnaire, the Abbé might have added the communities of migrant workers who lived in the capital and whose dialects had a noticeable effect on the speech of Parisian workers. (Robb 52)
During the Revolution, in one Gascon département, “priests complained of peasants falling asleep during the reading of decrees from the Assembly, ‘because they [did] not understand a word, even though the decrees [were] read in a loud and clear voice and [were] explained’. In consequence, successive assemblies encouraged the translation of decrees into local languages …” (McPhee, 38).
After his survey — presented to the National Convention on the very same day Robespierre was elected as the convention’s president — Grégoire concluded that “while France was the language of civilized Europe, France itself had no more than three million ‘pure’ French-speakers (11 per cent of the population), and many of them were unable to write it correctly”. More than six million couldn’t speak French at all, another six million “could barely conduct a conversation in it” (Robb 53).
In fact, Grégoire’s figures “were almost certainly an underestimate”.
Seventy years later, when official statistics treated a few days at school or the merest smattering of French as evidence of an ability to speak the language, many or most of the communes in fifty-three out of eight-nine départements were said to be non-French-speaking. In 1880, the number of people who felt comfortable speaking French was estimated to be about eight million (just over one-fifth of the population). Robb 53.
On page 54, he has an interesting map showing the spread of official French and dialects in 1863.
October 17, 2026
Ernst Jünger’s Storm of Steel, the true rival to All Quiet on the Western Front
Every year, Scott Alexander invites Astral Codex Ten readers to submit anonymous book reviews, and the most recent contribution is one of Scott’s reader’s review of Storm of Steel:
All Quiet on the Western Front ranks as the definitive anti-war novel of World War I, perhaps for all wars, and to some the most important war novel of all time. It was widely banned in the inter-war period yet went on to sell more than 20 million copies and has three film adaptations, the most recent the acclaimed 2022 version. It’s so famous, so prominent, so dominating, that the novel I think is the best war novel ever written can only point back at it from a “see also” link on Wikipedia. That novel is Storm of Steel, by Ernst Jünger.
You may recognize that name from 2023’s ACX book review, On the Marble Cliffs. It was my first serious look at Jünger as well; he is described as a “serial killer” and a “sociopath”, the kind of modern psycho who nowadays would take glee in uploading videos of drones blowing people up, someone perhaps who sees war as the chance to visit death upon human beings with the state’s permission. I had heard of Storm of Steel, heard the acclaim for it, but never read any of his works. What kind of man was this?
The Wikipedia page is light on details, but it’s beyond impressive. Jünger fought throughout World War I in the thick of it, starting as a private and ending as a company-commanding Lieutenant. He saw action at the Somme and Cambrai, the Battle of Arras then the Third Battle of Ypres and finally the Ludendorff Offensive. He was wounded 14 times, sometimes quite severely, and came out of it with the Pour le Mérite (the most prestigious Prussian officer’s decoration) alongside numerous other awards. Storm of Steel is, basically, his diary of his time in the war. After the war he was a very famous writer, and if you want to know more about him you should read the previous ACX review which covers his story more and is interesting in its own right.
So there was nothing to do but read it myself. Storm of Steel is not a very long book by page count. What I will call it is dense. It is not a diary that Jünger used to explain his theories, his ideas or his politics except as cursory asides. It is a book about WAR, hundreds of pages of it, from the mundane to the bloody to the idyllic. Storm of Steel is, in my humble opinion, the best war novel ever written.
I did not say that it is the best _anti-_war novel; I also did not say that it is a _pro-_war novel, although in some places and versions Jünger claims war can be glorious or make someone stronger in a rising-to-the-challenge sense. It is at its core an account of a war, a war more bloody and terrible than any of us could imagine, written by someone intelligent and gifted in writing who happened to see much of it and survive to tell the tale. It is by turns harrowing, riveting, insightful, terrifying, humorous, disgusting and soul-shaking. I had read All Quiet and Storm of Steel years ago, and for this review I read both again, then got a different version and translation of Storm of Steel to read it yet again; I can say that it was all worth it. There is nothing like it, and I hope that nothing like it will come ever again.
The Elephant in the Room
If you will forgive me a meme, if I had a nickel for every German World War I war novel I read that featured a bug-collecting protagonist who drank oily machinegun water during an attack, I’d have two nickels. Which isn’t a lot, but it’s weird that it happened twice.
Now that I’ve gotten that out of my system, let us truly begin. I opened with All Quiet on the Western Front for a reason: you probably know about it, and it’s also a German infantryman’s perspective of World War I. All Quiet also describes the horrors of trench warfare from the perspective of a veteran serving for years, of seeing death and destruction around every corner, breaks up its action with humor and levity, and ends with the war. The comparison is natural.
The truth is that All Quiet on the Western Front is a work of fiction with a thesis. It covers nearly three years, but Remarque was only on frontline duty for about five weeks. It’s unlikely that Remarque ever participated in the actual combat he describes: an article in the Süddeutsche Zeitung describes his service as mostly rear-area construction work; certainly dangerous, he certainly lived through shelling and gas attacks, and it’s a matter of record that he was wounded, but he probably didn’t see the relentless action he describes in All Quiet.
Storm of Steel was first published in 1920, while All Quiet came in 1929. Remarque was aware of this other famous account of World War I in his own language. I open with the bug-collecting and drinking cooling water because it’s those sorts of shared details that popped out to me after reading them both, but Jünger was an independently-famous entomologist and a stormtrooper commander and Remarque was not. He was on the periphery of such things, and between his time at the front and his time in the hospital, I’m sure he experienced enough and met those who did experience the combat he describes to create the agonizing story, but Remarque was justifiably reticent about discussing his own war experiences or explaining himself.
All Quiet intersperses brief periods of combat with long scenes of Paul returning home, of soldiers discussing how it’s really the leaders who should fight, of how training is miserable and the food is lousy and so on. It pontificates about the causes and horrors of war, about the damage it does to one’s psyche and soul, about how it makes men who should be brothers into sincere enemies, how it alienates the soldier from the civilian; it crafts a story for you to do all that. But it is a craft, and I think that detracts from its power.
Storm of Steel is true. It really happened, and it reports those happenings with minimal commentary. Many books start with an idea and write a world around them; Atlas Shrugged is a vehicle for getting the reader to an 80-page monologue about Objectivism. All Quiet is in that vein; it wants you to be anti-war, to feel the horrors of it, to know the unfairness, the blundering and chaos and death. It starts with the conclusion and works its way backwards. Storm of Steel works the other way around, describing it as it happened and drawing conclusions from that, but it barely draws anything itself and instead lets you do it, with barely a suggestive nudge. If you want to be pro-war, Storm of Steel will satisfy you with heroism and duty and camaraderie in the face of noble adversity. If you want to be anti-war, it will satisfy you with horror and futility and bloodiness in the face of a cruel industrial war machine. If you want to know what World War I was like for an infantryman, banally, you will hear about tasteless food and unceasing work and moments of absurdity and silly training. If you want to know what World War I was like for an infantryman, notably, you will hear about impossible situations and near-misses then grievous wounds and feats of daring and moments of sheer, unadulterated terror tempered by steely courage. If you want a few jokes, it even has some of those. But above all, Storm of Steel offers one man’s true and unflinching account of The Great War, and what an account it is!
British disability programs may extend to 25% of the population under current criteria
In the above-the-paywall portion of his latest post, eugyppius makes the case that the British social state, along with most other western countries, has metastasized to the point that it is uncontrollable:
Production line for the VW Beetle – symbol of a happier age, when our politicians forged a new democratic social state in Germany that today can no longer be financed or reformed.
Photo from eugyppius: a plague chronicle
On Sunday the Wall Street Journal published a long article headlined “The Welfare State is Crushing Britain“. It focusses on but one aspect of the UK social system, namely disability and sickness benefits, and its details are equal measures depressing, familiar, predictable and alarming.
Like other European redistributionist schemes, British disability payouts have steadily ballooned in the postwar period – expanding from a niche benefit for those unable to work due to serious illness and on-the-job injuries to a morass of programmes that showers millions of people with billions in pointless, self-defeating subsidies.
A 2024 government survey found that fully 25% of the entire British population might be considered disabled under present inflationary criteria, which adds perspective to the eye-watering figure of 10% presently drawing benefits. The fastest growth in disability claims occurs among working-age demographics, where compensation, once granted, soon becomes a powerful disincentive to work. In this way the British disability system actively cannibalises its own tax base. The total bill for sickness and disability benefits this year will exceed £100 billion, which comes on top of the £280 billion the British taxpayer presently spends on healthcare and which substantially outstrips the £68 billion British defence budget. Disability spending has jumped 25% over the last four years, and without reforms it will rise another 30% over the next four. Fuzzy psychiatric disability claims, from depression to ADHD, drive much of the expansion, as a whole universe of charities and AI-powered chatbots advise ever more able-bodied people on how they might opt in to this wonderful system of free money. Among many crazy details, we learn that those on disability can trade some of their cash benefits for new car leases every three years. This programme now accounts for one in seven automobile sales in Britain and has elevated the company handling these deals (Motability) to the largest automobile leasing concern in the country. The debt required to fund this and the rest of the British social system has driven borrowing costs to rates not seen since the 2008 financial crisis, while high taxes continue to encourage the emigration of the wealthy and productive.
These are the mere symptoms of a sickness that extends well beyond the United Kingdom. We are looking here at a fiscal and also a political crisis afflicting the entire postwar European model. Below the fold I want to explain the nature of this crisis and why our political systems seem powerless to address its fundamental causes – indeed, why many of our politicians seem determined to make it worse. With little chance of reform, we face a future of economic decay and declining living standards, culminating in sovereign debt crises and perhaps even political collapse. The postwar order is slowly dying, in its eighty-first year, of old age. There are no answers and nobody knows what will come next.
John Carter commented on Substack Notes:
The neglect of schools in order to pay for pensions is a particularly poignant phenomenon, a direct illustration of the old devouring the futures of the young. Eugyppius is correct that there’s no electoral solution to this mess. No one will vote to reduce their own benefits, and tax-eaters now comprise such a substantial electorate that any serious discussion of reform is political suicide.
State bankruptcy and economic collapse are real possibilities. Maybe “and then a dictator ends democracy” happens, but maybe not. For the young the all-devouring social state is increasingly unbearable. Polities that make themselves attractive to the young rather than the old could suck in such a large fraction of the youth that by the time collapse arrives, the social states are effectively retirement communities, and it just looks like a humanitarian crisis of starving geriatrics dying in their own unwashed bodily fluids.
Mussolini’s Ethiopian adventure
On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, Handre recounts the brutal invasion of Ethiopia by Mussolini’s troops in 1935:
Mussolini invaded Ethiopia in 1935, where Italian forces burned villages, deployed mustard gas banned under the 1925 Geneva Protocol, and slaughtered an estimated 275,000 Ethiopians in the first year alone.
The invasion was economic lunacy, directed by a sociopath seeking imperial glory. Italy’s economy in 1935 was already strangled by Mussolini’s autarky policies: state-controlled prices, forced grain production quotas, and currency manipulation that gutted purchasing power. Ethiopia was supposed to deliver raw materials and lebensraum that central planning couldn’t produce at home. This is the eternal promise of conquest: steal what you cannot generate through voluntary exchange.
It failed completely. The occupation cost Italy roughly 40 billion lire, accelerating debt that Mussolini’s treasury couldn’t service without the printing press. The resource extraction never materialized. Ethiopia’s terrain, infrastructure, and hostile population made profitable colonization impossible. Rome poured capital into a sinkhole while Italian workers at home faced food rationing.
The League of Nations imposed economic sanctions on Italy in November 1935, which Mussolini predictably used as nationalist propaganda. Those sanctions were both too narrow (they excluded oil) and too late to matter strategically.
State violence always carries a price tag nobody budgets for honestly. Mussolini thought he was building an empire; he was actually accelerating Italy’s slide toward the catastrophe of 1943
One of the major contributing factors to Italy’s economic woes was the same problem that all authoritarian regimes encounter: bad news is unwelcome, so fake good news is reported instead. That’s bad enough in the newspapers for general consumption, but it’s fatal in the long term for any centrally planned economy (and pretty much every fascist and communist government loved central planning).
The planners demand X million tons of steel, the steel mills can’t achieve that but they know the penalty for failure, so they … lie. The planners now allocate all that extra steel to manufacture tanks or trucks or planes … and the factories can’t produce their assigned output because they don’t get enough steel, so … they lie. The army doesn’t get as many tanks/trucks/guns/etc. as the planners say they will get, but they can’t tell the planners that they don’t have all the new equipment, so they lie and stage photogenic parades for the leaders and the cameras, cycling the same few dozen working vehicles through the same route again and again to “show their military might” … and to stave off anyone discovering that they don’t have all the new stuff.
The government then goes to war, knowing they have X thousand new tanks, trucks, planes, etc. and are horrified to discover that they don’t just walk over their opponents with sheer military might …
Everyone is Wrong about the Cromwell Tank
The Tank Museum
Published 19 Jun 2026Lacking firepower. Thin skinned. Many believe it was obsolete before it even went into combat.
Except … that isn’t all true.
Because the Cromwell didn’t just fight its way through Normandy, it was pivotal in the defeat of Nazi Germany.
After that, it held off Soviet expansion in Europe, held ground in Korea, and stayed in British service well into the 1950s.
So how did a tank everyone calls a failure end up doing all that?
In this video, we’re going to wade through the hate mail and see if we can convince you that actually the Cromwell did rather well.
00:00 | Introduction
00:52 | A Dysfunctional Start
04:42 | Built for Speed in a Slow War
09:48 | Failure in the Bocage, Victory in the Breakout
15:44 | The Tank That Wouldn’t Go AwayThis video features archive footage courtesy of British Pathé.
In this video, join our historian James Donaldson in defence of the oft-maligned Cromwell. Emerging from troubled development, the Cromwell proved itself in the European theatre as an exceptional reconnaissance tank and continued to be used well beyond the end of the Second World War. It was fast and versatile, utterly devastating when used properly, and stayed in service longer than many of its critics would care to admit.
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QotD: The original purpose of the European project
First, of course, was the fact that Europe was in no condition to wage another war. The continent was in ruins, the Germans were disarmed, the Americans would not have stood for it, and in any case the Germans had genuinely changed. There was no revanchisme to speak of in Germany, as there had been after the first war. Moreover, to the east was the looming presence of what in the 19th century was called the Russian steamroller, only infinitely worse than that of the time of Alexander I and Nicholas I, with a barbaric ideology that at the time attracted the allegiance of a considerable proportion of the population, especially of that part of it — the intelligentsia — that ought to have known better. Only American power prevented the steamroller from rolling west, and thereby kept the peace in Europe.
Even if the maintenance of peace was one of the original aims of the European project, this is a very weaselly way of putting it. Even without the European Union, Estonia would not attack Portugal, nor would Belgium attack Slovakia. What is meant by keeping the peace is ensuring that Germany does not again attack France (no one thinks that France would attack Germany): in other words, and to put it crudely, without the European Union people thought — even Germans themselves — that Germany would be up to its old tricks again. I do not believe this.
Theodore Dalrymple, “European Empire, Fractured”, Law & Liberty, 2020-11-10.
